ADAM It seems appropriate that on the day of the New York Marathon, we’ve completed our own marathon. I think we may be the only people we know who can say that we’ve seen all of the Disney Animated Canon films in chronological order.

BROOM I think that’s correct. You have several times said “We must be the only people in the world…!” which I don’t think is true. “Only people we know” I do think is true.

BETH Only people in the world who have recorded conversations after each viewing.

BROOM I’m the only person in the world who does a lot of the things I do. It’s a good way to be.

BETH I agree.

BROOM I think this was a good thing to do.

ADAM So what does this say about 2012?

BETH It was hard not to keep thinking about Snow White and how different the world was when that came out.

BROOM I’m going to request that we not make this the valedictory conversation, because we’re going to do that as its own event.

ADAM Do we have to rewatch everything first?

BROOM I’m preparing a retrospective post that we can read to refresh our memories, and then we’ll all discuss. But let’s talk about Wreck-It Ralph (2012).

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.

BETH Overall I really liked it. I have kind of mixed feelings and I’m trying to work those out quickly in order to discuss.

BROOM I don’t have mixed feelings, I just have unenthusiastic positive feelings. It was good enough. There were things that I was disappointed weren’t in it because they would have made for a better movie.

ADAM Such as?

BROOM It was formulaic and not in a gratifying way. It reminded me of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: “We’ve already exhausted all actual interest in the premise. What’s left is to work out these technicalities of plot.” In this movie, I really don’t care about who wins the race, or whether the girl is a glitch. I care about what it’s like in the world of video games. That’s the main appeal of this premise. But they just handled that in the style of, guess what! Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story. The secret world of video games is… a big bustling workplace with a tramcar, just like in Monsters, Inc. (and a lot of other things). “Yup, that’s what video games are like too. And now that you know that, you have to watch a story. And we made up this story.” They could have focused on charm, but it seemed like they were focused on other things sort of out of plot-necessity. Which is how I felt about Harry Potter toward the end of the series.

ADAM I thought there was plenty of charm here. Did you play Mario Kart?

BROOM Not much. I recognize the style of game.

ADAM You might have enjoyed it more if you’d played Mario Kart. It had all of the characters who play Mario Kart, but it was also clever…

BROOM I enjoyed when they played the actual games; I enjoyed when he was in his game, and then the shooter game, and then when they were racing at the end. But most of the movie consisted of him and Sarah Silverman trading quote-unquote banter, and it was neither here nor there. To me. In my heart.

BETH Did you like the making-the-car scene?

BROOM I just felt a little bit outside of the sense of investment that would have made any given thing that they did actually fun. I mean, it looked the part. For a kid watching, it looks fantastical. It’s certainly one of their craziest movies.

BETH Yes, but not really, because it falls in with the culture of the time. It’s not crazy, it’s how things are.

BROOM Another thing that came to mind was the second Lord of the Rings book (and movie) where I was invested in the real story, of the ring and the quest, and then suddenly the narration goes: “In the kingdom of Rohan, the king is under a spell and his daughter doesn’t know what to do.” And I would feel this sinking feeling, because who cares? The story becomes about how your story bumped into this other story. And that’s how this was constructed too. Wreck-It Ralph, the title character, is going to go in search of his medal!… but what’s it really about? Sarah Silverman vs. the King of Cartoons in some other place. Oh, okay…

ADAM I don’t know. What did I like about it? 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 looked 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.

BETH Yeah, it felt like a real game.

ADAM And I thought Jane Lynch was wonderful. And I thought whatsisname from 30 Rock was also pretty wonderful.

BETH Jack McBrayer. He was, but he was just being Kenneth.

BROOM That’s what he’s got.

ADAM That was pretty wonderful! It was amusing!

BROOM I would rather have seen a movie about him and Ralph relating. More than what we ended up seeing which was mostly about “Sugar Rush.”

BETH I was distracted by thinking about who voiced each character, more than I have been in previous movies.

ADAM Because they didn’t just sound like themselves, they were playing themselves.

BROOM And they all looked like them, too. Except for Jane Lynch, but close enough.

BETH She kinda did.

ADAM They weren’t playing themselves, they were sort of playing their own most famous characters.

BETH Yeah, exaggerations of themselves.

ADAM Did you know that [spoiler] was [spoiler]? Did you care?

BETH I didn’t know. I should have known.

BROOM I guess that was my favorite payoff in the plot. I should have seen it coming.

BETH It’s formulaic.

ADAM There were a lot of funny little quips that made me smile. Like that the police crullers were named Wynnchel and Duncan.

BROOM I liked the way that the donuts were animated.

ADAM I liked the way that the king involuntarily giggled, even when he was being menacing.

BROOM Well!…

ADAM Oh right, this is where the homophobia comes in. Go on.

BETH So. According to [guy who is the source of this objection, not present], apparently — this went over my head while watching the movie — apparently Ralph grabs the king and calls him a “Nelly wafer.”

ADAM That’s true, I noticed that. That was right after the “I see you’re very fond of pink.” “It’s salmon!”

BROOM Right. So that’s [this guy’s] objection.

ADAM Well, he’s not wrong! I mean, those things did happen.

BROOM But the king character, who, I believe [this guy] described as having gay-stereotype effeminate mannerisms… he was explicitly Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter or the guy on the ceiling in Mary Poppins. He was doing an Ed Wynn impression and so they animated him that way. I thought the idea of such a character being the king of candyland was a stock way of signifying that you’re in a [Ed Wynn lisp:] “crazy plathe where everything ith funny!” And while that may for all I know be in some extent derived from gay stereotypes…

ADAM Then why did they have to have the pink joke?

BROOM You could say that some of those jokes were tasteless, but the gist of [this guy]’s objection was “Disney is supposed to be a gay-friendly company and this is deeply shocking; it’s like having a racial slur in your movie…”

ADAM Well let’s be clear: it’s only a little bit, but it’s unmistakable. I definitely noticed it. Now I’m not saying the whole way they did the character was a gay stereotype. The character seemed equally as much like James Woods as Hades in Hercules.

BROOM You keep saying he seemed so “Jewish,” which I’m not sure I agree with.

BETH He seemed, you know, New York-y.

ADAM Well, that’s what that means!

BROOM I remembered that [this guy] had complained about the king character and how he was handled. So when he appeared, I thought, “Is there a real type of person who acts like this?” “Sure, to a point.” “So was it offensive when the Mad Hatter was like this?”

ADAM It’s not the same thing. I don’t think [this guy] is wrong. I don’t think it overwhelms the movie, but it’s clearly there. And it is true that Disney has this habit of having effeminate — or gender-non-conformist — villains. Ursula was like that, and Uncle Scar was like that.

BROOM But if we’re going to discuss this not on archetypal principle but on the terms of the movie, let’s acknowledge that in the movie it turns out [spoiler alert?] that his inner nature is not really like this, that it is a mask being worn to fit in with the candyland environment. The environment is the explanation for why he acts like that. It’s not that he’s carrying around some sexual identity that makes him act that way; it’s part and parcel of the world he’s a part of…

ADAM But we don’t know that until the very end. A child walking away from this movie is not going to think “oh, he was actually [spoiler].” He’s the king of candy!

BROOM We immediately understand things about him upon seeing this character, and they don’t have to do with his inner life. We know the Mad Hatter is mad, we know he belongs in Wonderland [Ed Wynn voice:] “becauthe he’th a crathy perthon and crathy people talk like thith!” Historically, is there a gay stereotype somewhere under that? There might be, but we’re going layers deeper than what I am ready to be offended at.

ADAM If they hadn’t had those two jokes in there I could agree with you.

BETH Those jokes flew over my head! I mean, I did hear the salmon thing.

BROOM I certainly didn’t hear him say “Nelly wafer.” Did he really say “Nelly” and not “Nilla”?

ADAM It wouldn’t make sense if he said “Nilla Wafer”. And that’s only a pun on “Nelly.” [ed: The script says “Nillie Wafer” and I can confirm that John C. Reilly does in fact pronounce it this way, though the vowel goes by very quickly and it could easily be misheard as “Nelly.” ADAM’s point about its function being the same holds.]

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM I thought it was funny when he said “he only glazed me!” and then he giggled.

BROOM I think part of the joke about the pink is [spoiler discussed at length]. Now, if he had said “pink ith fabulouth!” that would have been one thing. But what he says is, “It’s salmon, it’s salmon!”

ADAM I’m not endorsing the view, but neither am I dismissing it.

BROOM The joke about him not wanting to identify with pink is only offensive if you assume that he’s not just talking funny but is secretly gay, that this funny talking is a clue to something deeper.

ADAM That’s not true. If a straight male character has to come out in a dress for some reason in the plot, and somebody else says, “Nice dress, bro”…

BROOM Mm-hm, like in Mulan.

ADAM … the character doesn’t have to be gay for it to be a gay joke.

BROOM What I mean is that to make jokes about people being uncomfortable going outside their gender boundaries is not necessarily homophobic.

ADAM I declare a truce on this subject.

BROOM Good. None of us actually cares about this.

ADAM What do you think about this candyland being this noir underworld?

BROOM When was that?

ADAM Just that it’s this place with a dark secret in its underbelly.

BROOM I would have liked more of that, what you’re describing.

ADAM I thought that was funny.

BROOM I liked the aliens infesting candyland under the surface. I wish there had been more mash-ups like that! That was the whole promise of the movie.

BETH But that would have been overwhelming. There were so many possibilities.

BROOM I really expected that this movie was going to build up to a frantic jumping-from-one-game-to-another climax.

ADAM You mean Roger Rabbit style. As a child, the experience of seeing Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny in the same frame was so overwhelming.

BROOM I thought that at least Mario was going to show up! I thought, like, he would have to go to the bathroom and the plumber would be there…

ADAM Yeah, for some reason Mario didn’t actually appear in the movie, he was just mentioned.

BROOM It was like bragging, “we are allowed to mention him!”

ADAM Bowser was in it. And they had a Nintendo right-right left-left B-A…

BROOM That’s Konami.

BETH That’s right, all Konami games have that, but it was on a Nintendo controller.

BROOM But let me go back to my big disappointment. I want you guys to speak to this. I was looking to experience the new fantasy of “what kind of world do video games live in”? That’s what Tron was trying to do 30 years ago. And then I just got — it glazed me right at the beginning when it became clear that it wasn’t going to be anything I hadn’t seen before. It was just gonna be more Monsters, Inc. Part of the magic of video games is that they already do suggest a strange world with a quality all its own — which in no way reminds me of some massive industrial train-station mega-workplace. That just seemed so done and lame to me.

ADAM Well, I’ve never seen Monsters, Inc., so…

BETH Yeah, me neither.

BROOM Well, well! It’s just like that! All right, then maybe you can’t speak to this.

ADAM It’s interesting to think about it in terms of Roger Rabbit, because none of these are games that children in this demographic would have played. So it’s got a sort of nostalgia flavor to it. When I watch Roger Rabbit I think “it’s all my friends!” But these games — what 8-year-old has played Rampage?

BROOM Well, Rampage is not in this movie. They just borrowed the look, sort of, for Fix-It Felix.

BETH Well, maybe they are playing it because their dad has a console that plays old games, like the Wii…

BROOM On their phones! I thought this movie was maybe going to end on an iPhone. “They unplugged the machine but guess what! We live again! For $2.99!”

BETH I think old games are alive and well in the homes of young children because of our generation.

ADAM Maybe. It did seem like this was more for parents of our generation than for children.

BETH It did.

BROOM I mean… there’s a lot of problems with this. The ending they actually had was, “seems like we’re ‘retro’ now!” That was tacked on and hard to believe. Arcades like that are going out of business. “And I can see Sugar Rush from here…” The whole thing seems so thin. That’s the emotional ending? That he can see Sugar Rush, this made-up game? I’m not moved by that. The script was weak.

BETH 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.

ADAM You didn’t experience pleasure watching this?

BROOM I did experience pleasure on a mild level. It did feel long to me, in the middle. I didn’t enjoy Sarah Silverman’s character. The wise-crackingness, which I guess was supposed to be the ‘attitude’ of her game, wasn’t worth anything to me.

ADAM The attitude of our time!

BETH It was the pluckiness that she was required to have in order to live.

ADAM Why are you so insensitive?

BROOM And the resolution of her story that she’s not really a glitch, she’s the star of the game, but she likes being a glitch so she continues to glitch… and players love it after all? I don’t know what that is. There’s no moral. It’s every possible ending smooshed together.

BETH No. The moral is: be yourself.

BROOM Be yourself, even if that’s not who you are and someone made you into that by abusing you, when you’re actually a wizard Harry.

BETH Accept who you’ve become.

ADAM I thought it was super-scary at the end, when he turns into the hybrid bug.

BROOM That was overly scary.

BETH And when Ralph was about to commit suicide on Sarah’s behalf.

BROOM Eh. His revelation that he’s a bad guy and that’s good didn’t really fit. He was doing a heroic thing in some other universe. It has nothing to do with accepting yourself as a bad guy.

ADAM Do you think little kids know what happens if you put a Mentos in a Diet Coke?

BETH Well, they’re gonna try.

ADAM For that matter, do I know what happens if you put a Mentos in a Diet Coke?

BETH I think some fizzing.

ADAM It fizzes, probably.

BROOM If you told me the premise of the movie, that we’re following the bad guy from a video game on his quest of self-discovery, I would expect a more interesting story. About really coming to terms with who you are. Not a story where you happen to clean up the mess in someone else’s world and then you’re happy at the end. They missed the boat. It should have been about his relationship with Jack McBrayer.

ADAM But that would have been so boring.

BETH No, I think they could have made it interesting. I’m with you. I think they were struggling about what stuff to put in.

ADAM I think it should have been them sitting across a table in a therapy room talking about “what does it even mean to be a hero?

BROOM To be really accurate, nothing should have changed because video games don’t change. They should have showed us the same game over and over and we should have heard his thoughts.

ADAM And it should have been just sort of an exploration of ennui.

BROOM But really, I think it should have worked like The Emperor’s New Groove, where the good guy and the bad guy have to go on adventure together, and their relationship, which is the source of the problem, gets worked out through the adventure. That would have been more meaningful to me. And 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.

ADAM Did you watch that horror movie with John Ritter?

BROOM Was that a horror movie? I was thinking of that!

BETH I don’t know it.

BROOM The parents end up stuck in TV.

ADAM They’re being pursued by some malevolent force through every TV show. And he ends up in Three’s Company and it’s a big joke. I’ve only seen the trailer.

BROOM Me too.

ADAM It’s called… um… like Change the Channel or something like that.

BROOM Right, Remote Control (1990) or something like that.

BETH Poor John Ritter.

BROOM Wreck-It Ralph. It is what it is.

BETH I think as children’s entertainment in 2012 it was perfectly benign.

BROOM But as with Two Boys [per a prior discussion], I feel like the price of picking something “hot” is that you have to really have legitimate insight into that thing. Video games have this mixed reputation: on the one hand they’re big business and kids love them, and on the other hand there’s a soullessness to them and their culture. Like the Jane Lynch character: is that a good role model for anyone? why does she have to be wearing this breast-tight metal suit? Etcetera. All of the issues with what’s a little skeevy and weird about video games — the obsessive quality they have — these are things people think about when they think about video games. And the Disney humanist finding-yourself thing doesn’t immediately seem like it will fit with that. And instead of addressing it and making a case, they glossed over it. They glossed over any interest there could have been in making video games the subject matter.

ADAM It should have been a Platoon-style meditation on war set in Call of Duty. In an army hospital in a first-person shooter game.

BETH It’s easy to think of sequels to this, though. There’s a lot to plumb.

BROOM The fact that he’s from an innocent time and now things are less innocent: yes, he gets threatened by all the bugs, but it could have been a real thematic element…

ADAM And then he has bug flashbacks in his game.

BROOM I just thought it would have been interesting if something about the innocence of the old game was held up as a good thing. I guess at the end they go “they like us now.”

ADAM I mean, Felix marries Jane Lynch.

BROOM There’s something strange about that, is there not?

ADAM It’s just because she’s three times his size.

BETH And a lesbian in real life and he’s gay. That’s the stuff that was distracting me.

ADAM And they’re friends with Q*bert.

BROOM It was strange. When Ralph is torturing the sucking candy by sucking on him, if you think about the saliva eating away at him, that’s a horrible torture. It’s really horrific.

ADAM I don’t have much else. Eddie enjoyed it!

BROOM I’ll bet. It’s very lively.

ADAM Kinetic.

BETH Colorful. It does contain worlds that you experience fully. Like “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.

ADAM And is Snow White that great a story? Honestly.

BROOM It’s a better story than this.

ADAM It just has this aura of timelessness that makes it seem better. I mean, talk about formulaic!

BROOM I don’t know which direction the satire goes here. Are you saying that no-one should complain about anything? Or do you mean what you’re saying?

ADAM I don’t know.

BETH Let’s go to dinner.

BROOM Where do you want to go?

BETH I don’t know. Yay we did it!

ADAM No, we have to read the review.

BROOM Oh right.

ADAM I can’t believe we almost forgot that. Then we would have had to start from the beginning!

[we read it]

ADAM Well! I guess A.O. agrees with me!

BROOM The number one reader reviewer agrees with me. So we have nothing to say to that? So this will end with the transcript saying “we read the New York Times review and have nothing to add”?

ADAM That’s all, folks!

BROOM That really is all. So what’s gonna happen next is…

ADAM Are we gonna make a dialogue about Frozen after we see it?

BROOM Sure. But I think before that we do a wrap-up. That’s not out for three or four weeks, right?

ADAM Yeah. But that’s cutting it pretty close.

BETH Maybe we should. Maybe we should wait to see Frozen.

ADAM And then finally we’re in real time. I mean, we’re in real time now, but…

BROOM Okay, fine.

BETH And then after that we’ll discuss the entire series.

BROOM Given our project, this is a fascinating artifact. Don’t you think? It’s surprising that they made this movie and distributed it to theaters. Surprising for several reasons, some of which are critical and some of which are just historical. The effort to do honor to the old values and old properties of Disney, and the effort to make it up-to-date — which together were so dissonant and such a failure — felt indicative of where things are in 2011, culturally. When earlier movies made attempts to recapture “the old Disney,” I had the cynical sense that they just didn’t know how anymore. Now it’s like they so utterly don’t know how anymore that they’re very specifically doing an entirely different thing in its place.

ADAM [dubious ‘tude take] “O-kay…?”

BETH 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!”

BROOM Are you saying that about Christopher Robin’s portrayal, or the portrayal of his bedroom?

ADAM His bedroom was awfully steampunk.

BROOM It was like Zooey Deschanel album art.

BETH It was like the Wes Anderson version of Christopher Robin’s bedroom.

BROOM Where did we get this couch from?

BETH Room and Board.

BROOM It was like that.

BETH I don’t know how to take what you’re saying.

ADAM Well, I happen to have Zooey Deschanel right here… I haven’t thought of my meta-criticism yet, but can we talk about how dull it was?

BROOM Very dull.

BETH It was 53 intolerable minutes. Except for the Backson song on the chalkboard, which was obviously their “Pink Elephants” moment.

ADAM They were obviously bored, because they had these two — not just one, but two — flight-of-imagination fantasy sequences.

BETH Two Dumbo moments.

BROOM The second one was more like Alice in Wonderland.

ADAM That was obviously all that was getting them through the day. There were eight people credited for story in this movie. The original Winnie the Pooh movie was three different stories from the original books. This one was kind of a mashed-up version of two or three different stories, but they didn’t really fit together.

BROOM The thing with Eeyore’s tail is a story; the thing with them making a trap for something —

ADAM The heffalump.

BROOM — is a story. The idea of “The Backson” being something that got Christopher Robin, because he wrote “back soon,” is something.

ADAM The thing where they make tracks around a tree and then they get freaked out by them… I think that had been in the first movie already.

BETH Ugh.

BROOM The movie was dull because it had no flair, no charm, and the animation was very pedestrian.

BETH The animation sucked. It was Saturday morning cartoon shit.

BROOM It looked like one of those straight-to-DVD movies. You know, like Sleeping Beauty 3: Beauty’s grandchildren are having trouble with their pets!

BETH That’s why it was hard to believe it was released in theaters.

BROOM It all felt like the straight-to-DVD production package. Which would make sense of it. Maybe that’s what it was produced to be, and then they decided “hey, let’s put this one in theaters.” I don’t know.

ADAM Did the first movie have all those typography-interaction jokes, too?

BETH I think it did.

BROOM In a much milder way.

ADAM It had a couple.

BROOM I thought the first Winnie the Pooh movie was okay, but Adam, you thought it was unacceptable. You complained 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.

ADAM Actually, this time I thought the characters’ personalities were closer to what I recall from… I won’t say the books, but from the Saturday morning cartoons.

BROOM It was like the Saturday morning cartoons, in which the characters’ personalities were nothing like in the books.

ADAM Winnie-the-Pooh was sort of self-centered here, but he did still seem like the Winnie-the-Pooh of the books.

BROOM He was like Homer Simpson here! His honey dream was like Homer Simpson going to the land of chocolate.

BETH But don’t you think that Jim Cummings did a great impression of Sterling Holloway?

BROOM Yes! I was impressed.

BETH That was my favorite part: marveling at how well he did the voice.

BROOM I think he’s the same guy who did it in the 80s and 90s on the cartoon show. But all the other voices were terrible! I mean, Craig Ferguson as Owl was terrible, the Rabbit guy was terrible…

ADAM The Tigger guy was okay.

BETH No.

BROOM No. The original Tigger had a great voice!

ADAM I don’t know, I’d have to watch them side by side.

BROOM And I don’t think what you say about the characters was true at all. The strength of the first movie is its really rich character animation. Rabbit is kind of a Bert, kind of a curmudgeonly nerd, and Owl’s pomposity is real and internalized, it’s not just a thin veneer on an idiot. And Piglet is meek and honorable, he’s sort of like Linus, whereas here he was just, like, They Killed Kenny.

ADAM They all had pretty unappealing personalities, it’s true.

BROOM They didn’t really stick to character consistently, either. Why did we have to see Rabbit doing a bunch of ninja shit and everyone putting on helmets and doing a montage of military cliches? And Piglet doing Indiana Jones, or whatever that was…

BETH Yeah, it was Indiana Jones.

BROOM It’s this really offensive desperate grabbing at other stuff.

BETH I feel like that one was an in-joke, because it was very quick…

BROOM “In” for whom?

BETH For the animators. “We’re so bored that let’s put an Indiana Jones reference in this.”

BROOM Then they’re so lame! Did you guys sniff Chicken Little behind this at all? Because I did. I had that sense.

ADAM It wasn’t as bad as that.

BROOM No, it wasn’t, it was much better than Chicken Little, but I had that sense of nerd-world.

BETH I wasn’t thinking of it that way.

ADAM I mean, I see what you’re saying, now. Like, Chicken Little is Piglet.

BROOM This Piglet. If you asked, in 2011, what property Disney should make into their next movie, nobody would have said “they should make a Winnie the Pooh movie in the spirit of the 70s one.” It seems so completely not to fit with the times.

BETH I was thinking, what age of child would accept this?

ADAM This seemed to be for very little children.

BETH Very little, like three- or four-year-old kids.

ADAM It was so boring. And all of the gestures towards, like, “Cowabunga!” were not enough to make even six-year-olds want to watch this.

BROOM What age were we when we watched the Winnie the Pooh TV show? Seven or eight, right? You just accept stuff, on Saturday morning. I checked in with that part of my brain a couple times: “If I was just watching this while I ate cereal, would it be fine?” And the answer was: “… yeah, basically.” But here’s something that I wouldn’t have liked even if I was just eating cereal: Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey wet dream is gross and creepy. Like, honey is gross. That he eats it with a full fist has always been gross. It’s bright yellow, it’s putrid, and he sticks his fist into this opaque yellow honey and it goes all over his face, this has always been gross, and then they went and made a whole world of it.

ADAM It’s true.

BROOM And he swam in it. He would be drowning. It was awful.

ADAM And the physics didn’t work at all. He went into the pot and it oozed out, but then actually the level was like a foot below that.

BROOM Those psychedelic things — when I was a kid, it would be like, “wow, this is heady stuff… if everything was honey, how would you, like… sleep?” I’d start wondering “if he goes off that way, would he go forever? And it would still be honey?” That’s what a kid gets into, and in this scenario, the answers to all those questions were horrific. And the fact that Pooh was just reveling in all that horror shows how unsympathetic he is.

BETH I don’t agree with that!

ADAM I remember as a kid watching the Yellow Submarine movie — do you remember “Nowhere Man,” where they’re in that blank space?

BROOM Yes, that’s the epitome of what I’m talking about.

ADAM It actually did trouble me as a child.

BROOM I think it was supposed to, there. I feel like Winnie-the-Pooh’s real honey fantasy ought to have been him in his cozy house, surrounded by all the honey he wants, because he’s like a little British child who wants sweets. Not some kind of Yellow Submarine hallucination…

BETH That’s for the animators, again, because they wanted to play.

BROOM It’s just a wrong move. Like everything else here.

ADAM 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?”

BROOM Well, that’s the purely cynical explanation. I was saying, I think there’s some other kind of thinking at work too, in, say, the Zooey Deschanel thing. “Hipsters really like the innocence of childhood. The innocence of childhood really appeals to people right now, it’s really in. But we have to put a little bit of Go the Fuck to Sleep edge on it.”

ADAM Peter Rabbit on a skateboard!

BROOM When the animation first kicked in and the music started, and it was clearly twee-ified — “Let’s Get Quirky!” or whatever that SNL skit is — I thought, “Oh, I see! Might this possibly work?” And then 20 seconds in I thought, “I don’t think it’s gonna work.” And then there were 54 minutes left.

BETH It’s sad that that was the second to last movie.

BROOM Well, they’ll go on! Life goes on.

BETH I know.

BROOM “It’s sad that this is the present day,” you could say.

ADAM This is Barack Obama’s America.

BETH We’ll have to address that in a wrap-up conversation.

ADAM I don’t know that this necessarily reflects just the degradation of the culture — though surely it does, to some extent — but also, it’s trying to work within this, like, wheezing tradition…

BROOM That’s what I’m saying about straight-to-DVD. If you went to visit Eddie, and they were like, “we bought him this stack of DVDs,” and it was like, The Legend of Tinkerbell…

ADAM I’m sorry, you mean Tinkerbell: Pixie Hollow Games.

BROOM Very good, Adam! And whatever the others are: Lady and the Tramp 2, Lady and the Tramp 3, Oliver and More Company, whatever these things are. If you watched one, you’d think, “yeah, I kind of expected it to look like this.” Like a Saturday morning cartoon that goes on a little long, and is cheery, and has second-rate songs.

BETH And jokes.

BROOM And that’s what this was. It’s just that in this series, we keep saying, “this is what they’re making for kids now?” In fact they’re making all sorts of different crap for kids now.

ADAM Surely this had the lowest box office of any Disney animated movie in the last few years.

BROOM Nobody remembers this movie having happened.

BETH I don’t think they promoted it very much.

BROOM Not on the same scale. Basically, it’s strange that it’s on this list. It’s on a different scale.

BETH It doesn’t feel like it belongs.

BROOM And we’ve said that a couple other times. What are the other times?

ADAM Make Mine Music.

BROOM That’s right, in the 40s.

BETH There were 70s ones that felt out of place, too.

BROOM The first Winnie the Pooh, which was a compilation of shorts. And The Rescuers Down Under had that same feeling of “You didn’t really mean that, did you?”

ADAM Why are shorts so boring? If this had been three shorts I would have been even more annoyed.

BROOM Some shorts are good. All right, you want an answer? I think they appeal to a different kind of attention — more of a you’re-eating-cereal attention — which lasts for about eight minutes, happily. You think: “look at that! look at that! look at that!” And then after eight minutes, you think: “Why? Why is this still going on?” And a short can’t answer that question, because it wasn’t built to answer that question. And that’s what was so annoying about this script; that’s why there were all those story people working on it. They wanted to keep the feeling of episodic shorts, but to also have a long arc.

ADAM By which we mean that Pooh’s stomach has to disgustingly growl for 45 minutes.

BROOM Things that we liked: I liked that he sang a duet with his growling stomach.

BETH I did too. I was ready to be charmed based on that song.

BROOM I was already disturbed that the faces were so inexpressive, by the time that song kicked in. The first Winnie the Pooh has that sketchy, 101 Dalmatians look, where you see the pencil lines, and it has a real artistry to it. If Owl turns around and thinks, there’s a lot of cared-for character in every aspect of it. Here it had that dull, flat, spiritless quality. Rabbit was the only one with any skill to it, and then I saw it was done by Eric Goldberg. He’s one of the few names I know anymore; he’s been there a long time.

ADAM I like that Christopher Robin sounded like Kate Middleton’s sister.

BROOM You said something like “It’s Hermione!” That was how he sounded, like baby Daniel Radcliffe. “We found a kid who has a delightful English voice! And no acting skills!”

ADAM [horrible English accent]: “It’s so broad! Et was sewwww brawwwwd!” It didn’t sound like any English person that I’d ever met. It sounded like an English socialite who — you know those girls with the fascinators at the royal wedding? That’s how I imagine they talk.

BROOM Other things we liked?

ADAM …No. Nothin’.

BETH The beginning, I guess. When you said you liked how it looked already, at the very very beginning, I thought, “Yeah, this is nice.”

ADAM You liked that they got the original Pooh doll out of the Victoria & Albert museum?

BROOM They clearly didn’t.

ADAM They said they did.

BROOM The original Pooh doll looks like a ratty little thing, it doesn’t look like this Pooh at all.

BETH Can I say something I really didn’t like? When his stomach suddenly burst open and stuff started coming out! What was that??

BROOM It was disturbing. That’s an element in some of the stories that his fluff comes out and he needs more fluff, but for them to throw it in for just one second like that was like Alien.

BETH It was really upsetting to me.

ADAM Do we think this has any larger social implications than just “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”?

BROOM You know, we watched a lot of shitty cartoons as kids. We didn’t think twice about whether the center was holding. If we watched an episode of Gummi Bears now, we’d go: [deadpan] “Wow. I really hope those bad guys don’t get the Gummiberry juice to the castle.”

BETH This was better than Gummi Bears.

ADAM It’s true; I went back and watched some Different Strokes the last time I was at the Museum of Television and Radio. They were all really bad. I think the trouble is just when you work in an emaciated form.

BROOM Feature animation?

ADAM Well, Disney feature animation has all these constraints and baggage around it.

BROOM This didn’t really live up to any of those constraints.

ADAM I agree with you, but wouldn’t it have been better if they had just said, “We’re making Howl’s Moving Castle.” Or “We’re making the first Pixar movie,” which was not beholden to anything. And you can already sense now that the Pixar movies start to feel like they’re kind of straitjacketed by expectations. But that was not the case with the early ones.

BROOM Do you think that’s an artistic reality? Or just an reality imposed by the suits?

ADAM I think it’s a partially artistic, partially commercial reality.

BETH I think it’s self-imposed by the animators by what they see works, and what they get accolades for.

BROOM That’s what I thought was going on here. I thought this project had plenty of room, within it, for so much more artistry than they brought.

ADAM You need infusions of fresh blood from outside the form. Part of why Little Mermaid works and seemed like a rejuvenation is because it has this unabashed Broadway thing. And you’ll see that the next one has this unabashedly Pixar-y thing that makes it feel, you know, livelier.

BROOM Even though that is now a 20-year-old thing.

ADAM But it’s the high-low cross, in this case. Where Disney is the high and Pixar is the low.

BROOM I don’t think anyone sees it that way. I think it’s more like “I’m an Apple and I’m a PC.”

ADAM Fine, if you want. Old money, new money. But wouldn’t it be cool if they did a Disney movie that had, like, a Japanese anime infusion in it?

BROOM That was what Atlantis was supposed to be. That didn’t work.

ADAM Well, more stylishly than that. Like, someone who had actually seen a Japanese anime more than once.

BROOM Yes, I do.

ADAM Or what if they let, like, Chris Ware art direct a Disney movie?

BETH 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?” Maybe the suits. But maybe the artists too. It’s not even on the table.

BROOM I like what I’m hearing here. I’m always looking for how to be a better conservative, because they’re essentially conservative, but you’re saying “be radical.” And yeah, it would be great if they were radical.

ADAM Yeah. Some Mary Blair, some something. This just seemed like running on fumes.

BROOM Do you think it has to do with hiring practices? Because who was Mary Blair? Just some artist that they hired. It’s not like they were desperate for fresh blood; it was just part of who they had on staff. Now they hire these people who went to CalArts expressly to be able to do the thing. There truly was the sense of no ideas here, right?

ADAM and BETH Yes.

BROOM As a given. As the baseline. This is why we’re holding up Lilo and Stitch, which is, you know, okay.

ADAM Not that great.

BROOM But we were excited because it seemed like someone had an idea. Just putting watercolors in the background of that movie washed out your eyes: Ah! Something!

ADAM Yeah. I agree. This seemed like it had no possible non-corporate motivations.

BROOM Just a few days ago Beth and I watched, for my second time, the Wallace and Gromit feature-length movie, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It’s cute. And in the making-of material, someone says that he admires the movie because, quote, “You can’t write charm.” Charm is about sensitivity to all these little touches, and to create something that runs on charm takes great care. And they had done that. I absolutely agree; that’s what makes those Wallace and Gromit movies work: they care about all the things that add up to charm. And that’s what Winnie the Pooh is supposed to be! And it was like they gave it to, you know, swine.

BETH The animators didn’t relate to that.

BROOM I thought the background artists did okay. In emulating the style of the original illustrations.

BETH It’s an easier task. Because you don’t have to draw character.

ADAM I think this was the writers’ fault, primarily.

BROOM I think the fault was spread around pretty evenly.

ADAM Why would you take it upon yourself to rewrite this material? It’s like, “More Alice! Let’s do more stuff with Alice!”

BROOM Alice Down Under! Alice in Space! Alice Planet!

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM I imagine that if I had had to review Piglet’s Big Movie, I would have been similarly grateful for this.

BROOM It does give some perspective. All right, comparatively, this was a valiant effort to return to quality. But this is what I’m saying about classy conservatism. So sad that this is the classy version. Also, this mention of the jokes with the typography reminded me that I wanted to say: I didn’t like the payoff that they climbed out of the hole on the letters of the book. That joke doesn’t make sense within the scheme of the movie. It’s just stuff. It isn’t satisfying or meaningful or clever.

ADAM They totally forgot about the jump rope, by the way. You’re right, this is better than, like, The Cat in the Hat. You remember that?

BROOM The live-action one, with Mike Myers?

ADAM Yeah. It could be worse. It could clearly be worse.

BROOM Yes, all kinds of things can be worse than other things.

ADAM But the fact that this was bad even though they were trying to, you know —

BROOM First world problems, guys. First world problems.

BETH I have nothing else.

BROOM Here’s something important to say: one left. One left.

ADAM [drum roll sound]

[Warning: thorough spoilers. As has often been the case in these discussions. But this one I’m thinking maybe you haven’t seen yet.]

BROOM This project is fifty!

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.

ADAM The humor has kind of a Monkey Island quality, to me.

BETH He looked like Guybrush!

BROOM It felt like a video game in a lot of ways. A couple of which I like, and many of which I don’t.

BETH Visually, I have very mixed feelings about it. I thought her eyes were distractingly, wrongly big. He looked fine, so I don’t understand why they had to do that to her.

BROOM Because she is, and I’m making quotes here, “pretty.” It’s important for pretty characters to have giant eyes.

ADAM What did you think of her manic-pixie-dream-girl haircut at the end?

BROOM I was thinking, “everyone in the audience knows that can’t be done with just a single slice.” Spoiler alert!

ADAM I agree with you about the story. 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.

BROOM But that’s exactly one of the things that… Let me first say that I had mixed feelings about this movie, and I’m not sure that just expressing both halves of it will encapsulate my reaction; I think I need to resolve my thoughts and I haven’t yet. It’ll take me some thinking about it.

BETH But you should just do what you always do and say everything.

BROOM I’m going to. I’m just prefacing this by saying that I don’t think my final judgment of this movie will be as split as I feel right now. During the movie my opinion was on a roller-coaster both superficially and analytically, and now that I’ve seen the whole thing I’m trying to figure out what that adds up to. And I don’t know. But one of the things that I thought was potentially problematic – when I hear myself say this maybe I’ll find out whether I think it was really problematic – was that a teenager could identify with being manipulated by a parent, but this turned out to be the false-parent witch character! They made a point of having them say “I love you” to each other, which we as sensitive children are able to recognize as a bullshit “I love you” that a witch forces you to say. But then the fact that we can recognize this relationship in our real relationships with our parents… I don’t know what we’re supposed to take away from that. It’s weird to have a mother-daughter relationship that is completely false in a movie for kids.

BETH I think it wasn’t completely false. I think there was some real love; I think they had gotten to a place where Rapunzel loved her mother for real, and the mother loved Rapunzel in her needy insecure way that a lot of mothers exhibit.

ADAM Yeah. When she says she’ll go get Rapunzel special stuff for her paints, that was really affectionate.

BETH I think that was real.

BROOM Well, what you’re describing is the relationship from “Into The Woods,” which this is clearly patterned after. And by the way, it seemed clear to me that they knew that their target audience overlapped too much with the audience for “Into the Woods” to copy it exactly. So I figured the difference will be in how it ends. And it just ended with a standard villain death. It did not end with any kind of ambiguity about whether she had ever felt real love.

ADAM Well, this is a Disney movie!

BROOM But that’s exactly why it’s weird to have them saying, “I love you,” “I love you” and then suddenly say “oh wait no, you were a witch, you were a phony mother all along!” It’s weird. Like I said, I have to work this out. While watching I was worrying about kids seeing this, that the next time their parents were manipulative, they’d worry “are you really my parents? do you really love me?”… but then I thought, “calm down, kids work this stuff out better than that kind of paranoia gives them credit for.” But now that I’ve seen it all the way to the end, I’m not so sure what they’d work out.

ADAM That stuff’s all over Grimm’s fairy tales.

BROOM But Grimm’s fairy tales aren’t “contemporary,” and full of attitudirific dialogue to show you that “hey, it’s your awesome world, kids.” Fairy tales are safe exactly because they take place in a fairy tale world!

BETH But this is clearly a fairy tale.

BROOM It is, but her manipulation was not fairy tale. That’s why I say it’s so obviously patterned on “Into the Woods.” The real Rapunzel story is that she’s kept imprisoned in a tower. This idea that she and the witch have a sort-of-mother-daughter relationship is not implicit in the fairy tale.

ADAM But that’s much more interesting than just “she’s kept in a tower,” right?

BROOM It is interesting. But in “Into the Woods,” the use of it is toward this thematic idea that all family relationships are imperfect, have darkness in them, and you’re going to be alone at some point. This movie started there and then just developed toward an ordinary villain relationship. “You want me to be the bad guy? I’ll be the bad guy.” So the ambiguity got washed away in a weird direction. I don’t really know what the upshot of that is. I have to mull over it.

ADAM I think Eddie would have liked the funny dialogue in this. It was just knowing enough for a child. It had that same “Tiny Toons” knowingness quality that I often extol.

BETH Part of what’s funny is just the tone. And I think kids can get that it’s “hey hey!” funny even if they don’t understand it.

ADAM It’s funny just that a big axe-wielding executioner is a mime. And it’s funny also that Guybrush Threepwood is rolling his eyes during the funny song. And that the horse and Flynn keep elbowing each other.

BETH I thought the horse was a great character.

ADAM It was cute but menacing.

BETH It was actually a character.

BROOM I don’t want to be the crank, but that stuff you just talked about is the stuff that I didn’t like. I thought, “this is everything about Broadway that I don’t like.” And I’m not just talking about the songs. It’s the way the characters were presented, and the way the dialogue was presented.

BETH I didn’t like that either. I was just saying I could understand that kids would respond to that.

BROOM During that “we’re tough guys but we’re singing about our dainty dreams” song, my thought was… You know, whenever I type these up, I think, “why do I always have to say ‘my thought was’ and then an entire paragraph in quotes? I just should say it now. ‘My thought is this now!'” But the reason I do this is because I don’t know if it’s my thought anymore. I just know that it was my thought half an hour ago.

ADAM This is a testing forum.

BROOM Yes. So. I was thinking, quote, “this would be funny if it wasn’t telegraphed. And a kid would get this perfectly well even if it wasn’t telegraphed.” If a big guy acted dainty, that would be it, it would already be funny. Instead of a song with the lyrics “Even big guys have dainty dreams! My dream is dainty! My dream is dainty too!” and everyone else rolling their eyes and signalling “boy is this weird!” The whole song was that. I wasn’t able to be amused by it at all, because it spoke everything. As much of the movie did. And I thought, “little kids don’t actually need that. They’re not doing it just to be clear to kids; they’re doing it as a stylistic choice.” Which is what I don’t like about Broadway, the idea that telegraphy is of course the only possible mode.

ADAM Yeah, I didn’t like that chameleon that kept, like, “pointing” the jokes after they were made.

BROOM I didn’t mind the chameleon. I thought, “hey, the chameleon’s motions are pretty small. Kudos to them for keeping them small.” What I didn’t like was that the movie started with [sings forcefully:] “Here’s your hero! She’s a kid like you! It’s a Broadway show!”

BETH But the mom’s Broadway song was really good!

ADAM It was great. It both sounded good and had great lyrics.

BETH It was really Broadway, but I really thought it was effective.

ADAM Kudos to them for going back to their theater-fag roots. It really does work well with unashamed fairy tale. This was sort of unashamed fairy tale in its structure and resolution…

BROOM So let me say what I liked about it: the fairy tale. I believe the story of the movie’s development was that they were developing it as a beautiful fairy tale story, but then at some point decided “this isn’t going to be Rapunzel, it’s going to be TANGLED!!! And she’s gonna say ‘like’ a lot in the lyrics! And it’s gonna have ‘tude!” And I thought that element was strong at the beginning, and then sprinkled in various key places throughout, but the bones of the movie were actually not an attitude movie. And I enjoyed that movie, the straight story.

BETH That’s what I was saying. That the script, on a macro level, was great.

BROOM I mean, I don’t think it was special. Just that it worked well enough and I was willing to watch it.

ADAM But it did work.

BROOM At the end, she could have cured him…

ADAM It’s okay. It’s better for her not to have the magic hair.

BROOM I know, I’m saying he could have cut it right after she cured him.

ADAM That would have been a little too legalistic.

BROOM It would have been a better choice. Like, if you were there.

ADAM But it would have been in implicit violation of her promise. Maybe it wouldn’t have been her fault, but she would have broken the promise.

BROOM When she was making the promise, I was wondering, “is the moral of this movie going to turn out to be ‘go ahead and break your promises to your parents, if they’re evil!’?” When she said, “I never break a promise,” I thought, “well, promising never to leave this tower isn’t good for you. Screw the promise!”

BETH I had that thought. I also thought, “Oh, they’re going to let him die! That’s great!”

BROOM I also thought he was going to die.

BETH I was completely okay with that.

ADAM Nope. There was a second form of magic that you didn’t know about.

BROOM I liked that, because that happens in Grimm’s fairy tales, that tears fall and have a magic power that has not been announced previously. I thought, “Great! Now kids have seen that in a movie.” I also liked that the magic was pure pagan sun magic. It had nothing to do with artifacts or spells. “The sun dropped a droplet of magic. Here we go.” I was down with that.

ADAM I thought her look was really great. She looked a little like Bernadette Peters, in a distracting way.

BROOM Donna Murphy we’re talking about?

ADAM Yeah. You mean Mother Gothel.

BROOM Well, that’s the Bernadette Peters role.

ADAM Oh, she is? I didn’t know that.

BROOM You’ve never seen “Into the Woods”? When you see it, you’re going to go, “oh, Tangled kind of ripped this off.” Big time. Like, when the mother sings, they must have had a meeting and said, “so the mother has to sing the song from ‘Into the Woods,’ but it can’t be the song from ‘Into the Woods,’ she has to sing something distinctly other than that.” So what was this song?

ADAM “Mother Knows Best.”

BROOM The song in “Into the Woods” is “Children Must Listen.” The world is dangerous and children must listen. It’s the same except it’s not funny there. The songs here almost all had a quality of “it’s in quotes, folks!” that I don’t think contributes to anything other than what you mentioned, Adam, that sense of knowingness, which I think is just a shame! It hurts my heart that this was going to be a fairy tale, so why did she have to have Bratzed-up lips at all? I know it was just a little bit, but why at all?

ADAM But, like, “Be Our Guest” has that same lyrical ridiculousness. And so does “Under the Sea,” and all of the songs we really like from the last twenty years.

BROOM Well, both of those are straight-up celebrations of whatever they’re about.

ADAM But there are ridiculous puns about the dancing flatware.

BROOM The point of both of those songs is “what’s going on is great.” This movie didn’t have that kind of song, quite. They had that scene where they danced around in montage. I kind of liked that scene.

BETH Yeah, that was a good scene.

BROOM I thought the look of the animation also had that “Attitude!” “Attitude?” “Attitude.” “Attitude!” “ATTITUDE.” “Attitude!” on-and-on snappy quality.

ADAM You didn’t like that montage of quick cuts where she’s trying to force him into the cabinet at the beginning?

BETH I did not.

BROOM I just didn’t like the spirit of that, that pervaded.

ADAM That’s just cause you’re old, man. You’re a fuddy-duddy.

BETH That’s exactly what I don’t like about it either.

BROOM I mean, the CGI has this sterility to it already. They need to do everything they can to actually humanize it, not go in this other direction.

ADAM Okay, there were some things – like the Thunder Mountain Railroad sequence – that I could have done without; that was a little too much. But 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.

BROOM I got used to the way the characters looked after they had finally had a couple of scenes that were just story and being direct about what they wanted as characters. As soon as it got to the scene in the firelight where they start being honest with each other, and then the mother shows up and sets up her scheme, I thought, “I can watch this now! A plot is happening!” But when they were introducing the characters and they way they did that was just a lot of “hey I don’t know about you but I’ve got a quip to say…” followed by the ‘tude face, which a person can’t actually make but I’m trying to make. I’m trying to make my eyes get bigger on one side than the other. Anyway, that stuff is not character! Kids get so much of that already! That’s what’s so heinous about Bratz.

ADAM No no no, Bratz is not that.

BETH Bratz is much worse than that.

BROOM Bratz is just the extreme form. “If your lips look like this, then you’re done.” This movie is kind of like, “If you go like this [‘tude] and then go like that [‘tude] and then do a take like this [‘tude]… then you’re done.” I appreciated it when he said “I’m a big phony and I actually have these other feelings.” But she never got around to saying, “Hey, I’m a big phony too; I don’t know how I learned to be such a wiseacre since I live all alone.”

BETH That she was essentially socially normal was not believable.

ADAM Okay, come on. Also that her hair was not trampled and dirty after she went through the forest. Let’s have some suspension of disbelief here, people.

BROOM She was socially normal for a theater girl. The obsession with sarcasm.

ADAM She wasn’t that sarcastic. She had a kind of nerdy innocent that I thought was charming. She wasn’t actually completely socially adept. And I did really like the scene of her giggling and then crying and then giggling and then crying. I thought that was amusing and sort of apt.

BROOM It would have been okay if I’d believed in her core, that she was grounded. That’s the point of having an “I want” song at the beginning of these things – which they kind of did, but it was such a teeny-bop kind of song…

BETH And it was also very “Part of Your World.” But much worse.

BROOM That’s what I mean by the “I want” song. But her yearning song didn’t show her heart. It was just this very poppy “So then I cook a meal, I paint the walls again, and I wonder when I’m gettin’ out of this place!” It’s basically all like that, so it never answers the question it’s supposed to, which is “What is it like to be you? What do your feelings feel like? They don’t feel like that song. Nothing that you’ve done is what it feels like to be you.” So half of the movie just had this 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.

ADAM It was a well-executed Broadway-slash-video-game.

BROOM I feel like good execution would be a movie where I was just sucked in and didn’t feel this way.

BETH I was pretty sucked in.

BROOM From the beginning?

BETH Yeah. I mean, I was thinking, “these jokes are not my style; I’m not finding them funny.”

ADAM But at least they weren’t fart jokes. Honestly.

BETH I felt like I could look past that stuff.

ADAM Rapunzel was authentically girly but still convincingly heroical. I don’t know, man, I think that your anti-contemporary dyspepsia is coloring your opinion.

BROOM What was the last one we saw? I didn’t feel this way about it.

ADAM We didn’t really like The Princess and the Frog.

BROOM Well, I didn’t feel this way about it.

ADAM Well, there was no ‘tude in The Princess and the Frog.

BROOM Right, so it’s not just a contemporary thing, it’s a particular way of being.

ADAM And then we criticized it for being wooden and politically correct!

BROOM Well, that’s a different issue!

BETH How can they win?

BROOM I’m just saying, it’s not like I have a one-note complaint. It’s specific to what I just saw. And I want to reiterate, for parts of it I was like “oh, now it’s working.”

ADAM So what was your single favorite element?

BROOM I think… when they got to the kingdom and were just dancing around, I had a nice moment. “This scene is about whatever it feels like.” I enjoyed that, and I would have enjoyed that as a kid. I think I liked that sequence the best.

ADAM I really liked Mother Gothel. I mean, I’ve never seen “Into the Woods,” but I thought she was just fresh and clever. This movie reminds me strongly of [Kendra Koppelmeyer].

BETH I was thinking about [Kendra] a lot!

BROOM When I said “normal for a theater person,” I was gonna say something about [Kendra].

ADAM Sorry, [Kendra]. Don’t use her last name in the transcript.

BROOM I’ll transcribe it as, um…

BETH [K], period.

BROOM I’ll just make up a different name.

ADAM But put it in brackets to make it clear that it’s not what we were really saying.

BROOM “Kendra.”

ADAM The mother seemed really stage-mother-y to me in a way that was satisfying. I mean, I guess she was vaguely related to the agent character in Bolt.

BROOM That’s what you said during Bolt.

ADAM I cited this movie?

BROOM You said “wait til we see the mother in Tangled.” I’m not sure I see the connection there.

BETH I’m not sure I do either.

ADAM Well, I do, because apparently I’ve cited it twice without remembering. I don’t know, the sort of manipulative fake sincerity. Maybe that speaks to me for some reason, I don’t know why.

BROOM I feel like the wonder of this scene we’re looking at on the menu screen now, the tower in the hidden valley, is…

ADAM This frankly looks more like the Black Cauldron video game.

BROOM Yes, some fantasy world. And the part of me that enjoys that sort of thing is a part that has no interest at all in attitude and a lot of quips in this mode. They’re motivated by a kind of phoniness – he admits! The character admits as much in the movie, which was an interesting thing to have happen.

BETH But the movie was still doing it.

BROOM The movie was still living that way. I wanted the movie to sit at a campfire and open its heart and say, “I’m actually just a fairy tale. I just act like I’m a hip kids’ movie because I feel like I have to, like no one would like me if I was just a fairy tale.” And then we could say, “I like you better this way.”

ADAM I don’t know man. I mean, this is a commercial enterprise. It’s like you want it all to be Maurice Sendak or something.

BROOM You can try to caricature “a nice fairy tale movie” as some kind of extreme thing to want…

ADAM Not “extreme,” but…

BROOM Look, I liked The Emperor’s New Groove, I liked —

ADAM The Emperor’s New Groove was full of ‘tude.

BROOM That’s what my point is.

ADAM I see.

BROOM I’m not incapable of enjoying jokes. None of the jokes in this movie made any of us in this room laugh out loud. They were all jokes that we already know. They were being done to the form, which works for kids because they can go, “I know this form! I know this!”

ADAM Eddie wouldn’t know those jokes.

BROOM I bet he would. I bet watching this he’d feel like, “I get it! Because the big guy sang a little song!” “He hit him with the frying pan!” The frying pan felt like such a story-doctored thing. “Okay, we’re going to put a wacky element in and string it all through the movie, for no reason. How about they all hit each other with frying pans?”

BETH I agree with what you’re saying. And then I’m thinking, “well, I just watched 100 minutes, which is a really long movie, without thinking ‘man, I can’t wait for this to be over,’ which is so frequently what I think when I’m watching these.” And so how do I reconcile that? I didn’t like the attitude but… the movie was pretty good!

BROOM Like I said at the beginning, I’m of two minds and I’m not sure how they’re going to work it out. The other mind is: oh, that was fine. It’s pretty. At first I thought it looked like Barbie dolls, but then I saw that no, it looks better than that. I don’t know how this is all ultimately going to land for me.

ADAM To me this is the most satisfying one since Lilo and Stitch.

BROOM Interesting.

ADAM I mean, that’s a pretty low bar, but still.

BETH This is up there for me, too. Not because I connected with anything. I just felt respect for the execution of this story.

BROOM That may be right, that it’s the most satisfying one since Lilo and Stitch, which is not inconsistent with all of my reservations about it, nonetheless. Because what else is even in the running? It’s better than Treasure Planet.

ADAM It’s better than Bolt, it’s better than Home on the Range…

BROOM For me it’s not too far from Bolt. This was a little better because the story started to feel a little richer toward the end.

ADAM I thought it was distinctly better than Bolt.

BETH I liked Bolt. I think it’s better than Bolt but not significantly.

ADAM Well let’s see what A.O. Scott had to say.

BROOM Is there anything that we usually talk about that we haven’t touched on?

ADAM Sexual orientation? There is no sexual orientation in this movie – well, maybe the big guys all doing the dainty things. But that is such a hackneyed gag that it really has no —

BROOM There you go!

ADAM I mean, it is a hackneyed gag! I’m not suggesting that it’s not. That’s what I mean by Monkey Island humor.

BROOM Monkey Island is like a stick-puppet show. It’s like “we made things move on a computer! We made pixels look like people sort of! So what should we make them say? ‘Wah wah wah! Joke! Punchline!'” It’s a Punch and Judy show; of course they’re hackneyed jokes. Whereas here, it’s supposed to be this wonder-world that we lose ourselves in. So my standard is going to be higher. That’s what I mean about the fantasy landscape. Enjoying that is like losing myself in wonder. Which is definitely what they wanted me to do during the… paper towel scene, what were those?

BETH Lanterns.

BROOM It looked like a lot of rolls of paper towels. And they basically had me! I was really on the edge of being able to feel awed by that.

BETH I thought that was a lovely scene.

ADAM Yeah. That was a very effective use of the CGI.

BROOM Beth, it’s funny to me that you are saying this was so palatable to you. Because you know I’m trying not to think about your thoughts all the time. But when I was thinking, “oh, this is all hateful Broadway stuff,” the thought arose, “and you know if you hate it, Beth really hates it. She can’t stand Broadway bullshit.” But I told myself, “don’t even go there. If she’s pissy afterwards, fine.”

BETH But I surprised you.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM I agree the narration was no good. And that lame stuff at the end was just one of a hundred things they could have ended the movie with.

ADAM It’s like the ending of When Harry Met Sally. Actually, the movie reminded me as much of anything of Misery. There’s a scene at the end where the Kathy Bates character bakes him a cake to celebrate finishing his novel, and it has that same Stockholm syndrome-y sweet/horrifying quality.

BROOM Which is why I am dubious about your answer to me that, “no, they really did love each other in some sense.”

ADAM But that’s it. If they didn’t love each other in some sense, it wouldn’t be horrifying. That’s a necessary element of it being jarring.

BROOM Well, I think that’s why we say “Stockholm syndrome,” so that we don’t need to call it “love, like the love a parent has for a child in a Disney movie.” It’s horrifying at the level where even adults don’t “go there.” So I can’t really believe that this movie wanted us to go there and say “that was love, but love also sometimes consists of a witch abusing you.” I just don’t think that was here.

ADAM Well, kudos to you, Disney, for drawing inspiration from a beautiful Fragonard painting.

BROOM The Fragonard element is, I would say, faint.

ADAM Attenuated. But it is lovely. And they didn’t ruin it.

BROOM They didn’t ruin Fragonard?

ADAM Or Rapunzel. The end.

ADAM It was a little too impeccable.

BROOM Visually?

ADAM In general. It was so carefully regional and carefully politically-correct-but-not-too-politically-correct. It was just careful. I thought it livened up at the end, but the first half seemed a little dead.

BROOM I felt the same way. Once it started to be about the stupid technicalities of the plot, that’s when I had something to care about. Moreso than at the beginning, when it just felt like the obligatory setup of a typical Disney story. And that’s sad. You should get to care about something more than just how the rules of the magic kiss work.

BETH I was disappointed, but I actually 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. I liked that she wasn’t striving for something imaginary.

ADAM [whispers] And she was black!

BETH That’s something that we can get into – though I don’t know if I feel like getting into it — why it is that the black lead character is the earthiest, most grounded heroine in the Disney oeuvre.

ADAM Well, is she really, or is Lilo?

BROOM That’s true. Of course she and her sister were about as “black” as they’d done before.

ADAM Truly, this is the promise of Barack Obama’s America.

BROOM No kidding! But they must have been making it before that.

ADAM Doesn’t everyone have an idealized black friend? Like, in their mind? Okay, let me refine that before you put it in your blog.

BROOM No shame, keep going.

ADAM I mean, of course, the heroine who was very stylized and rendered and characterized but not too characterized… I sort of felt this originally when we had the family in The Emperor’s New Groove and they were homey — but just a little bit off — but in a homey way. The good characters have just been getting more and more good in a focus-group way.

BROOM Don’t you feel that Pocahontas was the worst of that, and now we’ve been going the other way?

BETH What about Brother Bear?

ADAM I’m not talking about the glorious PC-ness of Pocahontas. In the 90s, you would have a commercial where there were three white dudes and their black friend, and they’d be like, “hey guys, wooo!”

BROOM “Wazzuuuup!”

ADAM Exactly, and then in the 2000s, you’d have commercials where all the friends were black, but it was just as much of a “gotcha” post-racial thing, just a little bit more subtle. To me this was that.

BROOM All right, well, I’m going to go further into offensive territory.

ADAM That’s because you have a pseudonym on this blog.

BROOM You can have a pseudonym! Starting now!

ADAM “Mike”?

BROOM How about “Dustin”?

ADAM “Laetitia.”

BROOM When I see portrayals of black characters in children’s fare like this, I have the same skepticism that Adam has, and I think it’s because I sense that…

ADAM … it’s no accident.

BROOM … that it’s medicine, condescending medicine from white people. Because it must be, because we all know that what black people would really do is feed themselves shit.

ADAM Whoa, whoa, I wasn’t going to go there.

BROOM I’m saying it’s subconsciously racist of us, that this is where our skepticism seems to comes from. I recognize myself feeling like, “I could believe that black people would make and enjoy things that denigrate black people,” but when it’s healthy and benign like this, I find myself thinking, “hm, this seems like it must be the work of condescending white liberals.” That cynicism is problematic. When I see something that seems like it would probably be perfectly good for a little black girl to watch, I tend to think, “well, this is obviously white people being presumptuous.” I’d like to get past that.

ADAM But this isn’t for little black girls, it’s for little white girls.

BROOM Well, what makes you say that? This is my point.

ADAM That’s where the “medicine” quality comes from.

BETH I think it’s for everyone, really.

ADAM Can’t we just accept Disney’s medicine? “You tried with Belle, you tried with Pocahontas, you’ve been trying for a long time.” She didn’t even have a dead mother, this time!

BROOM Don’t you see this and Mulan as different from Pocahontas? Pocahontas was not made for a Native American audience. Such people don’t exist as an audience, as far as Disney is concerned. That was purely a sanctimonious guilt trip movie, for the conquerors. But Mulan and this are intended for the Asian and black audience. In a foolish way, but still.

ADAM Oh, I think this is for the white audience that voted for Barack Obama.

BETH I think it’s for the white audience and the black audience.

BROOM Let’s look at the non-politically correct elements. The fact that the bad guy was like every pusher-man pimp stereotype…

BETH He looked like Samuel L. Jackson.

BROOM He looked like Prince to me. But the character was like Sportin’ Life, the bad guy from Porgy and Bess. An old standard negative black caricature.

ADAM But he had more heart to him than Tiana and Naveen did. They just seemed so careful that they lacked vigor.

BETH I agree.

BROOM But that’s why I’m saying they weren’t written “to show white people what black people are like.” I mean, yes, I think they thought it would work both ways, for both audiences.

BETH It wasn’t The Cosby Show.

ADAM It wasn’t as lively as The Cosby Show. Bill Cosby was very gifted at characterizing. This just felt a little wan to me. 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…

BROOM In these movies, when the Rescuers go down under, of course it’s going to be some stupid stereotyped version of Australia…

ADAM But this was even more lavish and quote-unquote “authentic” than the Rescuers’ Australia.

BROOM Yes, this was much better than that. It made New Orleans seem warm and appealing – in fact I was thinking that it might make kids want to go to Mardi Gras, and then the parents will have to say, “no, we’re not going because it’s not actually like that.”

ADAM Was this movie begun before or after Hurricane Katrina?

BETH Absolutely after. Maybe they thought it would be a boost.

ADAM A tribute.

BROOM I’d guess this idea had been kicked around for a while; New Orleans seems as promising a place to set a movie as “down under” or “the old west.” Speaking of which, for much of this movie I felt about the same as I did about Home on the Range. Until it started getting sort of moral at the end. As for the racial aspect, I guess I was relating it to that George Lucas movie…

BETH The one about the Tuskegee airmen.

BROOM Red Wings? [ed.: Red Tails]

ADAM The one that was sunk by its piety?

BROOM The movie he made, he George Lucas, to help black culture. He who is now married to a rich black woman. I don’t know if that qualifies him as a princess…

ADAM Who’s he married to?

BROOM Some successful black businesswoman from Chicago.

ADAM Oprah?

BROOM It’s not Oprah. You can look her up. Anyway, that he made this movie essentially from a condescending white person’s point of view, but a well-meaning one, and I felt like there was the same kind of queasy well-meaningness here. And we ask, “well, why should Disney deserve to be well-meaning?” At first I had the same skepticism that you had: “Oh sure, a beautiful black family that has no characteristics.” Other than that they love each other.

ADAM And are hardworking.

BROOM Hardworking, serious people who happen to be poorer than their extremely spoiled white friends.

BETH But they love life, they love people, they love food…

ADAM But that white girl…

BETH Honey Boo Boo.

ADAM She was spoiled but she had a good heart too. In some ways she was a more interesting character, because she wasn’t Anastasia and Drizella.

BETH She wasn’t a wicked stepsister; she was bratty but loving.

BROOM She was obviously totally spoiled, and they weren’t going to moralize about it.

ADAM And I also liked the voodoo man. He was different from other Disney villains in a way that was interesting. And I kind of liked the slapstick-y ethnic-caricature Cajuns, who remind me of the slapstick-y ethnic-caricature Irish types of sixty years ago.

BROOM The bad guy assistant to the prince was more like one of those characters. He was the same guy who brings the kids to Pleasure Island.

ADAM No, he was an exact replica of someone more recent than that.

BETH He was like someone from Cinderella.

ADAM He had the same voice and the same look as… someone from Aladdin, maybe. That exact character was in one of them, recently, down to the buck teeth. I’ll have to think about it.

BROOM Well, when you read your own words, maybe you’ll think of it. Anyway, I do think there was something interesting about where the movie went when it came time for a moral. Because Tiana kept saying “I’m hardworking; you can’t just wish for things.” And then the lesson was kinda, like…

BETH “No!”

ADAM “You can just wish for things!”

BROOM … “Maybe you should dream a little.”

ADAM Lighten up a little bit!

BETH Relax!

BROOM The spoiled girl and the spoiled guy are both good-guy characters. This is not going to be a movie about how you have to work all the time. The star that he thinks is a firefly is not a firefly, and you are not doing him any good by telling him that. He is happier than you.

ADAM Couldn’t they have waited one year until the following Mardi Gras, when presumably that same girl was going to be the princess again?

BROOM Or couldn’t he have gone to find another princess? His parents probably know some princesses. They might have cut him off, but if he writes home to say “I’ve been turned into a frog; can you get me a princess?” they probably would want to help.

BETH I don’t think he can write, because he’s a frog.

BROOM You got me there.

ADAM Do you think we can find an angry commentator saying that Mama Odie is a magical negro character in a way that is deeply problematic?

BETH Yeah, sure we can find one!

BROOM The whole movie was a magical negro. I mean, she provided her services to other magical negroes; they help each other out.

ADAM Was Naveen black? Or was he just foreign?

BROOM He was of mixed and/or vague race. Which is to say he was from Maldonia.

BETH I don’t think he was “black.”

BROOM I think he was North African slash Mediterranean.

ADAM Well, that was super-progressive of Daddy LeBouff in 1912.

BETH I would say 1920.

ADAM The newspaper splash was “Wilson Elected,” at the very beginning.

BROOM And then she ages.

ADAM Oh, right. So it’s like 1923. Well, that was very progressive of Daddy LeBouff in the 20s.

BETH To even patronize the black establishment.

BROOM To go to her restaurant at the end?

BETH No, at the beginning. He went into the diner. Everyone there was black except for him.

ADAM Well, he just liked the beignets.

BROOM Is it true that New Orleans has always been a little more progressive and mixed? Isn’t part of the point of setting this in New Orleans that black people were genuinely less marginalized there than in other parts of the country?

ADAM The stereotype has always been that in the south, they would “let you get close, but not let you get high,” and in the north it was the other way around; there was no social intimacy with blacks but there were fewer impediments to their success.

BROOM I thought New Orleans was a little pocket with a slightly different racial culture.

ADAM Did this remind you of True Blood?

BROOM I’ve never watched True Blood. It reminded me of The Secret of Monkey Island.

ADAM That voodoo was super-scary!

BROOM Way too scary. When his face changed into a skull-clown during his song… I love it, now, as a grown-up, I find that kind of thing exciting. But way too scary.

BETH I was thinking minimum age 12.

ADAM When he gets dragged to hell in the cemetery? That’s scary!

BROOM Well, he did owe some kind of debt to Papa Legba or whoever. Going back to Mama Odie. I thought her hideousness was interesting, interesting that they had gone there. She reminded me of the dwarf-y old lady who comes to save the house in Poltergeist —

ADAM He was the Mad Hatter! Sorry, but, of course! He was the Mad Hatter.

BROOM I don’t know about that. But at least you found what you wanted to say.

BETH Mama Odie looked to me like the witch from Snow White.

BROOM Really? The craggy “here’s an apple” witch?

BETH Yeah, but much more saggy.

BROOM She looked like her skin was falling down, a droopy falling-apart face.

BETH I thought it was calling back to that a little bit. Just sayin’! All right, I guess we’re all inaccurate.

BROOM So the moral was in her song, which is 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.

BETH I liked that moral.

BROOM It’s a complicated moral, because these movies are all about what you want!

BETH I thought, “what is a kid supposed to make of that song?” Tiana says, “I just need to work harder and get my restaurant,” and Mama Odie is like, “God, no! You don’t understand!” As a kid I would be really confused by that.

BROOM I think a kid would understand it, and not be puzzled the way you are now, because they wouldn’t be looking for a moral. I think as a kid the takeaway would have been clear to me. Tiana’s nice and all, and her commitment to work is obviously good for her, but: she’s never danced!? She doesn’t know love!? She needs to be happier! And we all know that. I appreciated that they trusted kids to get it. On the other hand it is confusing because all the other movies that resemble this don’t say the same thing. They say that “what you want” is your storyline.

ADAM [singing] “I wanna know…”

BROOM And also: she still got her damn restaurant at the end.

ADAM That’s true, she did.

BROOM The ending seems to be that they have to settle for just being frogs and being happy, and getting married in the woods, but then of course by magic it all works out that they get what they want too and that’s the real ending. It’s a complicated problem. Because if it had ended with them staying frogs, like Brother Bear, I would have found that totally annoying.

ADAM Where did they get all the money for the wedding?

BROOM The wedding in the woods?

ADAM No, the second, fancy wedding, with the carriage.

BROOM That we saw suggested during the credits?

ADAM I guess the parents came over, so maybe they just sprang for it. But do you think the parents were satisfied being served by their son, the prince, as a waiter in a restaurant?

BROOM He was a “featured dancer,” I would say. And ukelele player.

BETH I thought the backgrounds were gorgeous.

BROOM Yeah, that’s really what I got out of it. A kid watching this would get atmosphere out of it, and sure, so did I. I thought it was redundant with a lot of other movies. I know I’m saying the message was a little unusual, but otherwise it seemed to be copying a lot of things from other movies outright.

BETH Don’t you think it was winking homage, a lot of the time?

ADAM They had Cinderella’s carriage in the first shot.

BETH And they had Cinderella’s dance shot.

BROOM I mean, the whole Cinderella thing happened… I was kind of bored in the first half because it was so thorough in being familiar.

ADAM 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.

BROOM Not for the rules of the magic. Though I don’t think voodoo really cares about princes and princesses. I liked the scary voodoo gods.

ADAM The shadows? They were terrifying.

BROOM Straight out of Fantasia.

ADAM I liked that they pulled Naveen by grabbing his shadow.

BROOM You know, it was fun! I didn’t mind it so much.

BETH I didn’t really like it! But good for you!

BROOM It didn’t really work. But I’ve been teaching myself to watch them the way a kid who enjoys them watches them. And as I get closer to that, it gets simpler. “Was this a picture book?” Sure. 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.

ADAM It had the nourishing attention-to-detail of American Girl Place.

BROOM There was an American Girl quality to it.

ADAM Which is not actually satisfying, because it’s too careful.

BETH I’ve had easier times getting into the past couple movies, I think because the heroes were male. And 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.”

BROOM You have higher standards for the ones with female characters.

BETH I guess it’s just that since I invested part of myself in it, I wasn’t able to watch it the way that you were just describing.

ADAM And then you were like, “All you’re good at is cooking? Why can’t you do archery? Lean in, girl!”

BROOM That’s how everything was for me for a long time. When I read Proust in college, I thought, “this is amazing because it reminds me of thoughts I’ve had, about life!” because that was one of the first times that I’d had that experience. Prior to that, I took almost all movies with the attitude of, “Obviously none of these people is like me! That’s absurd! Of course not! Of course I’m not ‘invested’ in this! I’m watching a movie!” And I think that a lot of the offense that one can take against a Disney movie is some form of “what about me? And what about reality?” Well, guess what! It doesn’t work that way.

BETH I know! But because my initial thoughts were, “Oh, this is so much more about reality than usual!” I was let down by where it went.

ADAM Well, you’ll be pleased to know the next one is about a struggling web designer. It’s mostly about font choice, actually.

BETH Great!

BROOM It’s called Lilo and Beth. Songs? Randy Newman? Thoughts?

ADAM They were good. True to form, but they totally worked.

BETH They didn’t jar.

ADAM I did not feel jolted out of the action.

BROOM I thought the first song was the weakest, and that hurt my impression of the movie. “Almost There.” That’s not a very specific hook.

ADAM Was that the first one? Wasn’t there a “New Orleans” one before that?

BROOM Oh, that’s right, that weird montage of all the characters that we didn’t know yet. At the end, you said, “That was super-complicated!” And it was. Now, in retrospect, I understand that we saw the Shadow Man eyeing John Goodman because he had a plan to kill him and take over the town. But I didn’t follow that at the time.

ADAM Well, it wasn’t a very good plan.

BROOM Now we’re going to institute a new feature that I call “Predict the New York Times Review.”

ADAM I think the New York Times review is gonna be just like what we said. It will be generally praising but a little bit eye-rolling.

BETH I think it’s going to be 80 percent positive.

BROOM I think it’s going to be very positive, because this was the return to traditional animation after they said they were never going to do that again.

BETH It was super-lush. I thought the colors were wonderful. I enjoyed looking at it.

ADAM It was very pretty.

BROOM So I think it’s going to say that it’s great that they’re doing this again.

[we read the review]

BETH Ooh! That was harsh.

ADAM That was a little more cynical than even I felt.

BROOM Boy, I got that wrong.

BETH We all did.

ADAM I mean, it does feel focus-grouped. I think you will be satisfied when you see the next one that it feels a little bit fresher than this.

BETH So this is really just four years ago.

ADAM This is the year that Barack Obama was inaugurated. It was a different time. More hopeful.

BROOM [reads from this article about objections raised before the movie’s release, up to this paragraph:

“Disney obviously doesn’t think a black man is worthy of the title of prince,” Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. “His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking their head in befuddlement and even rage.”

]

ADAM Well, in fairness, she has a point. What if the guy had been tall and nappy-headed? It would have been a slightly different affect.

BROOM I don’t think you can make a legitimate point by saying, “This character is not black so clearly Disney doesn’t believe that a prince can be black.” That’s not reasonable.

BETH I guess if you’re following the argument that everything in this movie is focus-grouped, then it is reasonable.

ADAM I mean, she does have very straight hair.

BROOM We have these phony conversations. At any time, any interest group can stand up and say, “well, Disney hasn’t yet made a movie with Palestinians in it who are just ordinary characters. They obviously don’t think Palestinians deserve to be a prince and a princess.”

ADAM Come on, come on! Disney obviously was willing to reap the PR benefit of having the “first black princess.” And then the first black princess looks like a white girl with some black, sort of —

BETH I don’t think so!

BROOM She didn’t!

ADAM She has very straight hair, and very Anglo features.

BETH I don’t think her features are very Anglo.

BROOM I think her features were convincing as —

ADAM Well, she doesn’t look like Precious.

BETH Should she??

ADAM Well, you know what I mean.

BROOM I don’t know what you mean!

BETH On the subway ride home tonight, you’re going to see a lot of black women with beautiful features and straight hair.

ADAM Okay, but fast-forward four years to the debate about Brave. Where in the movie version of the character, the girl has this frizzy red hair, and then they lost heart and made her thinner and have straight hair, particularly in the action figurines. I mean, this stuff matters! And if you’re gonna try to get points for progressivism, you deserve to be faulted for things like this.

BROOM It matters in a game, exactly, of point-giving. Here’s something else from this article:

Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer who is African-American and has two children, applauded Disney’s efforts to add diversity.

“I don’t know how important having a black princess is to little girls — my daughter loves Ariel and I see nothing wrong with that — but I think it’s important to moms,” she said.

BROOM cont. That’s right! It’s always all to save the children, the children, the poor little children. And then of course Disney wants to show that they’re good guys, they want people to think of them as good guys… How do you feel about the proposal that Ender’s Game the movie be boycotted because Orson Scott Card has written articles against homosexuality? Does that make sense to you?

ADAM I haven’t really followed it, I don’t know the details.

BROOM Someone posted on Facebook today linking to an opinion piece arguing that boycotting Ender’s Game is not a good response to Orson Scott Card’s homophobia — and it got this thread of furious Facebook responses: “This is bullshit!” “This guy should think before he writes.” All this anger because they’re so excited to boycott a movie.

ADAM This is a debate that goes back T.S. Eliot…

BROOM What’s the T.S. Eliot connection?

ADAM He was a raging anti-Semite. Should we not read T.S. Eliot? But this is a different question. This is not about “who is the shadowy creator behind this?” This is about “what are the images that are being put forward for public consumption, and being valorized as somehow a step forward?” So, okay, yes, she’s black, but she’s also wasp-waisted and super Anglo-looking! It just strikes me that it’s, you know, two steps forward, one step back. I get where people are coming from with a comment like that.

BROOM All right. Well, I can get where people are coming from and still think that they’re wrong. The question is whether there is such a thing as “forward.” I think that a lot of this rhetoric is falsified. And when you say it’s not about the shadowy creator, well, the quote in the article about “Disney clearly doesn’t think a black man can be a prince” — that is about a shadowy creator, an imagined enemy figure.

ADAM All right, let me say something different, which is that if we’re trying to score these in terms of progressivism, which maybe is a dubious —

BROOM Okay, but before you finish that: are you? Do you want to score things in terms of progressivism?

ADAM I’m saying, to the extent that that’s the game that we’re being invited to play, and clearly that’s the game that Disney wanted us to play, because that’s how they were building buzz for the movie, I think Lilo and Stitch is a much more quote-“progressive” movie than this is. And a much more radical departure from their normal mode.

BETH Yes. That was a radical movie.

ADAM Lilo and Stitch was a crazy, cool movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not more prominent. In retrospect it seems much more appealing to me than it did before.

BROOM Would you agree with this?: that anyone who says “Give us points for being progressive!”, it hardly matters what they’re doing — they’re not being progressive.

ADAM Well… no. Because sometimes, whatever token thing you’re doing is valuable. If there were a movie about, like, gay princes who had a relationship, I would be super-tickled, no matter how horrible the movie was in other ways. Even if they were body-dysmorphic, and white, and gender-conformist.

BETH But don’t you know people who actually look like that in real life? Why are they supposed to make a character who is not appealing? It seems like what you’re saying is, “Let’s make her look like Precious because that’s real.” But what’s real is everything.

ADAM But they’re inviting us to pat them on the back, so we might as well —

BROOM Well, they’re inviting us to pay them money. And the fact that we want to pat ourselves on the back for boycotting the bad guys and doing business with the good guys is a game that we buy into, that we create. Yes, of course, if I had to go into kids’ entertainment, and they told me, “you know, the moms will be up in arms unless you do this!” Then, sure, I’ll do that. That’s not the same as being proud of myself first and then begging you to love me.

ADAM Well, okay, let me a different proposition, which is that if Disney films did not have totemic cultural power, we wouldn’t be doing this exercise in the first place. For better or worse, their actions are scrutinized. When they replace a fat woman chasing a pirate with a fat woman chasing a pirate holding a pie, we’re entitled to ask, “is that really a legitimate change?” And that’s sort of what they’re doing here. They’re inviting us to consider this in explicitly political terms. And so it’s only fair to take them up on that invitation.

BROOM Okay, but you sort of made a lateral move there. They have totemic power as what they are, which is things for kids to watch. And the mode in which kids watch them is not evaluative, it’s just receptive. Which is why it’s powerful. But then there’s a separate thing, which is the adults looking in critically on the choices. Curriculum review. “Oh-ho, I see you’ve got in your curriculum that you’re going to read Cry, The Beloved Country.” The kids who actually read it have a basically innocent experience. I think sometimes we predict what it’s going to do them and we get it wrong. When an administrative decision is made, that’s an entirely different thing from the actual power the product ends up having. So I think that a lot of the conversation about what power these things have is phony, on both sides —

ADAM I would like to know how my nephews react to this movie.

BROOM You’ll find out.

ADAM I’ll find out. It would not surprise me to find that Eddie had a Tiana doll. I don’t know that I need to carry this torch all night. I mean, I don’t know how committed I am to this position, but that is, I think, the rejoinder to what you’re saying.

BROOM All right. Three to go.

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.”

BROOM I’ve never seen Milo and Otis.

ADAM All right, The Incredible Journey, if you prefer.

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.

ADAM It was, in fact, contemporary with this project, wasn’t it?

BROOM That’s right, I believe this was the first one that came out while we were doing this project. This is the first one that we talked about how in some crazy distant future we’d watch it. And this is the crazy distant future, because that was five years ago.

ADAM Although very little has changed.

BROOM In any respect, personal or national.

ADAM Well, no, Barack Obama is president.

BROOM That’s right, that hadn’t quite happened yet.

ADAM That’s a big deal. Okay, so, Bolt. I thought this was basically sympathetic and pleasurable to watch.

BETH I agree.

BROOM Yeah. But you have to get acclimated to what type of movie you’re watching. I feel like I have all these different slots, and the experience of watching these is always “so which kind of thing is this? Okay, and is it a good one of those?” This was in the “post-Toy Story” category.

ADAM It was like watching Buzz Lightyear in his Buzz Lightyear mode for an hour and a half.

BROOM Disney established a thing with Snow White, and then made that for a little while, and then they had to sort of establish a new thing, and made that for a little while. And it feels like a thing was established with Toy Story and we’re still doing it. And that was twenty years ago, now! Most animated movies now still feel like Toy Story, to me.

ADAM Yeah, this certainly did. This felt like it had a lot of animator in-joking in it.

BETH That stuff didn’t bother me.

ADAM There was all that hyper-verisimilitude in recreating the backdrops, which was sort of unnecessary.

BETH But I understand why that’s satisfying.

ADAM To them.

BETH And to me, to see them do it so well.

ADAM But doesn’t it take you out of the movie a little bit?

BETH A little bit.

BROOM No – I thought part of what this movie showed us was America now, and I like anything that makes America now look like a fun place to be. I appreciate that. Because I need all the help I can get.

BETH There could be waffle houses everywhere!

BROOM Well, the waffle house was different; the decor was sixties mix-and-match, like the end credits. But there were some things that were definitely the present day. Like the TV show “Bolt,” surely the most expensive TV show ever produced.

BETH It was basically The Fast and the Furious, but with a dog.

BROOM As a weekly TV show.

ADAM So at the beginning, [Broom] and I knew that it was about a dog that thinks it’s a superhero, but Beth, you appeared to actually think it was about a dog that is a superhero — what was your initial reaction?

BETH I was like, “This is like The Fast and the Furious! How strange that they have decided to go this direction. And also amusing because they seem to be winking about it.” I truly didn’t know what was coming. I would have accepted that. But it turned out to be The Truman Show.

BROOM I thought the very first scene in the pet store was awful…

ADAM It was just like the very first scene of Meet the Robinsons.

BROOM … and when they went into the TV show, I thought, “I see, it was supposed to be overly sappy because it was his origin story on this over-the-top TV show.” But in retrospect I don’t think that’s what it was. I think that scene just kind of sucked, and the rest of the movie seemed sharper than that. But… there are a lot of habits and mannerisms in comedy these days…

ADAM Like the hamster.

BROOM Right. I knew it couldn’t be Patton Oswalt because Ratatouille already got him. So it was just fake Patton Oswalt.

ADAM Let’s go back to your “America now,” because all that Copland-ism on the soundtrack seemed to me to be really hammering that home. And of course they did undertake a journey by U-Haul and truck from New York to Los Angeles.

BETH There were a lot of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure references in this too.

BROOM References? Or just similarities?

BETH Well, probably just similarities, but there were a couple of gags that I think were made with the knowledge of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Like when the pigeons are talking and the truck appears right behind them, it’s exactly like when the bike appears.

ADAM There were a lot of gags from a lot of things, in this.

BETH It was referential but in a smart, non-annoying way.

BROOM I don’t know if those things are referential or just borrowed. Also, the impression one gets watching Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is that the whole structure of it is borrowed. That “someone who has to travel the entire United States searching for something” is already a tired old movie concept.

BETH What old movie?

BROOM I don’t know, but it seems like the point is that it’s standard fare. National Lampoon’s Vacation has the same attitude. There are a lot of these road trip movies.

ADAM There were a lot of bits in here that I also couldn’t decide if they were homage or borrowed. All the Hollywood stuff is obviously borrowed.

BROOM I actually liked the New York pigeons here, I thought they were well done, and I especially liked it when there were L.A. pigeons at the other end of the stereotype. I enjoyed it much more than I usually enjoy that very old bit.

ADAM What, animals having regional accents?

BROOM Yeah: “Welcome ta New Yawk! In New Yawk even da pigeons tawk like dis!”

ADAM Does that happen in… what am I thinking of?

BROOM Oliver & Company?

ADAM Like, Madagascar: Lost In New York?

BROOM Yeah, everything.

ADAM That’s a real movie?

BROOM That’s a combination of several things.

ADAM I’m thinking of Home Alone.

BROOM Pig in the City.

ADAM So what do you think this says about America now?

BROOM I think it just embraces it. I note that we saw some people in New York, but they just looked like “people,” and then we saw some people at an RV stop in Ohio, and they just looked like “people.” There was no impression of class or substantial differences.

ADAM People are pretty decent. Except for agents and network executives.

BROOM Even the agent. There really was no bad guy in this movie, was there?

ADAM Folly.

BROOM Hollywood.

ADAM The agent was as close as it got to a bad guy, and he wasn’t a real bad guy, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t get a real bad guy sendoff.

BROOM He got booted. He didn’t, like, fall off a cliff screaming.

ADAM I’m grateful that he wasn’t super-Jewy.

BROOM I took him to be…

BETH He looked like…

BROOM I can’t think of his name. I want to see if we’re thinking of the same thing.

BETH I bet we’re not. I’m thinking of… Malcolm Gets.

BROOM No, I thought he was supposed to be the guy from the fashion reality show.

BETH Tim Gunn! I didn’t see him as Tim Gunn.

ADAM A little bit! I was afraid he was going to be the Hades character from Hercules, and he wasn’t that. Or, like, the bird from Aladdin. You know, a sort of grating Jew. That’s the obvious way to take this. And this was like a gratingly sincere —

BROOM He wasn’t sincere! I liked the line about “I’ve got a beautiful girl at home and I’d trade her for you in a second.”

ADAM Sincere’s not what I meant to say.

BROOM I think what you meant to say was “insincere.”

ADAM Don’t cut me off! I thought the whole 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. I think you’ll find, when we get to Tangled, that the stage mother character is also a familiar stereotype refreshingly executed.

BROOM This woman wasn’t a stage mother. She was just, like, Edie McClurg.

ADAM She didn’t have a backbone until the end, but she had a basic goodness.

BETH I feel like they made her into sort of a southern doting mother who’s always around.

BROOM That’s not a “stage mother.”

ADAM She didn’t stand up to venality until the end. Everyone was redeemed by that horrible fire. Except for the studio.

BETH I’m surprised that the show continued to be produced.

BROOM Strangely, this movie was ambivalent about whether that man in the chair was her father. I mean, apparently he wasn’t. But she didn’t have a father. They’re like, “her father got kidnapped!” but later we find out that’s not her father. She just doesn’t have a father.

ADAM Wait, when did we find out that wasn’t her father?

BROOM Well, when we find it out it’s a TV show, there’s no reason for it to be her father.

ADAM Okay. The Penny character has a father back home.

BROOM Except that she doesn’t.

ADAM Bolt doesn’t have any parents.

BROOM You know, this movie is based on something that actually happened to John Travolta.

ADAM I liked the cat. The cat felt like a slightly better version of the Rosie O’Donnell cow.

BETH I agree.

BROOM Who is Susie Essman? I know that name. Is she the woman on Curb Your Enthusiasm? [ed. Yes.]

ADAM I thought Bolt got over the trauma of his whole life not being what he thought it was pretty quickly!

BROOM Because he’s seen Toy Story where exactly the same thing happens, so it’s easier for him. Yeah, it was interesting where the emotional beats were. In a way, the biggest one was just on driving across America, and being yourself. Accepting that if you’re a dog, you should enjoy the pleasures of being a dog and not the pleasures of being a superhero.

BETH That seemed like the core.

ADAM It’s depressing.

BROOM No it isn’t! When he puts his head out the window, you didn’t think that was right?

BETH That’s the moment that I will remember from this movie.

ADAM Wallow in your mediocrity!

BROOM What do you mean, mediocrity?

BETH No! The simple pleasures of life. Like the fireplace, when she says “it doesn’t get any better than this.”

BROOM Real life! She points at the poster and asks, “Does that look real? Does that look real to you?” I endorse that. And also, for all that it’s kind of old business at this point, I enjoyed that the nerd who’s totally gone into Don Quixote make-believe is also the one who can give the pep talk about believing in yourself because you are awesome.

ADAM It’s like Rudy.

BROOM I’ve never seen Rudy.

ADAM You know, the mental invalid of the group is actually the spiritual core. I mean, all of the emotional beats in this movie were just business ripped from other things.

BROOM Yeah, it 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 beats; we promise not to embarrass you too much with them. Unlike, for example, Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler, the preview for which we saw on this disc, where you know that when the tear beat comes, it would be unbearable. But it’s the same basic package.

ADAM But neither is it, like, Mufasa holding Simba to the heavens.

BROOM That’s true. That was an attempt to be primal.

ADAM But they’ve continued to alternate, recently.

BROOM What’s the most recent one that had any kind of weight?

ADAM Brother Bear.

BROOM You’re right. They just fucked it up, but that’s right. Brother Bear did attempt to be about the meaning of life, but it was just so stupid.

ADAM And then Home on the Range was this. And Chicken Little was this.

BETH I have to say, I was touched by parts of Meet the Robinsons.

BROOM But it’s still in this category.

BETH Yeah, it’s still this.

ADAM Epic vs. picaresque. That’s not quite the right division but you know what I mean. There was no “Circle of Life” here. Just the simple pleasure of sticking your head out the window.

BROOM And there’s another type, the Little Mermaid type. That’s not really about the circle of life — maybe a little, it’s about coming of age — but mostly it’s about the emotional heft of the story. The emotions are what’s going to get you through. Not all the bits.

BETH Even Little Mermaid was a bunch of bits, though. Or at least a bunch of showtunes.

BROOM I feel like when you go that Broadway place, it’s about feeling invested in “will she get what she wants?” Whereas here — I mean, it’s John Travolta, who’s gonna care?

ADAM The whole point of a fairy tale is of course that it’s derivative to the point of being runic. The fact that it’s so predictable is because it hearkens back to something deeper and older than ourselves. There’s a comfort and a sort of dignity in that. Whereas something like, Bolt galloping into Penny’s arms — though I guess it turns out that she’s really opening her arms for some other dog, but even that rug-pull is old. But whatever, at least they didn’t fuck it up. I wonder why Madeline wanted me to buy this for Ed? She put it on his Christmas list.

BROOM It’s basically harmless, except that it shows intense action from other movies at the beginning, and so implies that you can watch those movies too.

ADAM You don’t think it creates a world-weariness about Hollywood? Would you let your child watch The Player?

BROOM Did you think that, like, Porky in Hollywood or whatever created a world-weariness about Hollywood? I saw a lot of that stuff as a kid and it didn’t mess me up.

ADAM Or The Muppet Movie.

BROOM “Prepare the standard ‘rich and famous’ contract for Kermit the Frog.”

BETH At the beginning, before I knew what was going on, I was surprised that Disney was apparently showing people killed. Then I thought, “no, I see, the guys in the car crash are still conscious.” But I was still trying to process what that meant.

BROOM Yeah, what’s the last death that we saw in one of these movies?

ADAM Don’t we assume that, like, Ursula dies?

BROOM Yes, and that was twenty years ago.

ADAM Well, in Brother Bear they go into the afterlife.

BROOM Oh yeah, that’s right, the brother dies.

ADAM You guys keep forgetting that Brother Bear exists.

BROOM It’s hard to remember.

ADAM What did you guys think of the music? What did you think of the Miley Cyrus musical intrusion in the middle?

BETH I did not appreciate it.

ADAM It’s not a bad song though.

BROOM I smirked for a while and then just rolled with it, which is my attitude toward all of these.

BETH Sure, it was fine, I just think that’s a bad idea in general.

BROOM You know, five years ago at the beginning of this project, part of my agenda for myself was that I wasn’t going to let my standards slip. But.

ADAM They have.

BETH You have to take everything on its own terms.

ADAM Trophies for everyone!

BROOM You just have to decide what you’re doing, every day. I want my standards not to have slipped. The question is, how do you disapprove of something without being angry at it? Because I don’t feel angry at these people or this movie.

BETH It’s just being mildly disappointed.

BROOM In the world.

BETH In culture. It’s very reflective of what culture is, right now.

ADAM It’s a shame that we don’t have the Pixar movies in this journey. Is Ratatouille worse than Bambi? No.

BROOM I believe it to be.

ADAM Really?

BETH He’s not a fan of Ratatouille.

BROOM I’m very aware of the formulaic-ness of these movies. While the formula is not an insulting one, it is also a distancing one. It’s safe because it’s not unsafe; it doesn’t risk things in a way that would make that experience significant. This movie didn’t risk anything, and we didn’t have to risk anything emotionally while we were watching it.

ADAM You feel like in Bambi you do? I guess when the mother dies that’s pretty bad.

BROOM Yeah, it’s terrible. You feel imperiled in those early Disney movies. But, now, let me reflect: is it just that those remind me of being a child?

BETH It’s hard to know.

ADAM Let’s ask Ed!

BROOM There’s something so worldly about the style of these recent movies. The camera style, the references, everything.

ADAM That’s what I mean about joking about agents and Paramount studios.

BROOM Remember when in The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone they started to have a couple of “it’s the 60s, mom!” references, and we were so embarrassed for them.

ADAM The Beatles vultures.

BROOM And television at the end of Sword in the Stone. Just a couple of little moments that said “yeah, we know where it’s at!” And our response was “Oh, please don’t know where it’s at!”

BETH But when I was a kid, I felt adult watching The Sword in the Stone, because I thought, “I get that!”

BROOM You were being pandered to.

BETH I apparently was.

ADAM I don’t know. Worldliness is very pleasurable. Whereas sincere emotion is childish.

BROOM FUCK YOU!

ADAM And as a child, it’s pleasurable to be aspiring to worldliness.

BROOM I wasn’t drawn to that, as a child.

BETH I totally was.

BROOM I would have disliked both of you, then.

ADAM But [Broom], you’re a wounded bird!

BROOM I’m wounded by everyone else’s need to seem worldly. And now I’m fighting back against it. And I think that an animated movie is one of the few things that used to endorse that there are in fact simple things in life.

ADAM Oh, you should have seen this amazing apartment I saw today; it has a dog spa!

BROOM Does it?

ADAM No. My own building has a dog spa. You can leave that out.

BETH Don’t leave it out.

ADAM Even when Aaron Copland is being used hackishly, it still thrills me. Just those kinds of chords make my heart sit up a little straighter.

BETH “Thrills” is strong, but I agree. If you have to rip off a musical style, that’s the one to rip off.

BROOM It means that you’re in America.

BETH It’s nice! It feels hearty. Unlike, you know, every commercial that’s made now, where the music is Philip Glass style.

BROOM Really, Thomas Newman, in the post-American Beauty genre.

BETH This music feels like it comes from a real emotional place, even if it doesn’t.

BROOM I guess what I’m saying is, when we see that montage of America in this movie, and we see a beautiful vista, and a guy playing with his dog, and a windmill, and it’s clearly “the part when you think about beauty,” I, in my wounded bird way, think, “couldn’t there have been a whole movie that was this nice?” Why did we have to earn this moment by crawling through all this commercialism?

BETH Because 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.

ADAM I think actually we should buy [Broom] some Veggie Tales.

BROOM That’ll set me straight. I think Toy Story is actually a more important movie than people might give it credit for. Not just in establishing what you can do with computers, but in establishing a particular attitude toward commercial culture. It’s based on all these plastic products of mass production, and invests them with everything a kid invests them with, and makes them live. And that’s why people love that movie, because it doesn’t feel dirty, it doesn’t feel like a Happy Meal. It just feels like this the real value of toys. And I actually feel sickened now when I see that there are actual Buzz Lightyear toys, because the point was that he represented things that in their actuality would actually be much more offensive than this fully embodied character they created. And I feel like a lot of the drip-down influence of Toy Story, in Pixar movies but especially in things like this that are at one more remove, sort of misses some of the point, which is that there’s all this tawdry stuff in America that people invest with meaning and make real for themselves.

ADAM That’s what I was saying about real estate earlier.

BROOM But it’s different! It’s different when it’s mass culture that’s imposed on you than when it’s a thing that you picked to identify yourself. When you flip on the TV and there’s all this shit there, you don’t say, “this is my TV.”

BETH And you’re calling toys part of “mass culture”?

BROOM Yeah. I feel like kids are the victims of toys, in a lot of ways. They see the commercial and then they want it. They’re not defining themselves as much as just seeking out the thing they’ve been made to lust after.

BETH Right, but once you have the toy, and I thought this is what Toy Story was about, you do infuse it with yourself, and then it turns into something completely different from a mass-produced object. Now it’s you, now it’s part of your world.

ADAM Right.

BROOM Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. And Adam, I know that’s what you were saying about apartments, but I feel like if the initial impetus is “well, I’m going to define myself with this, I’m going pick the thing that represents me,” that’s not how kids pick toys. They just get toys because they think they’re awesome.

ADAM That’s because you find children more sympathetic than grown-ups.

BROOM Well, kids don’t attempt to define themselves with their purchases, and adults do all the time. Maybe kids do now. But that’s not why I wanted toys. I wanted them because, you know, “you run, you slide, you hit the bump and take a dive” – that looks awesome! I never thought, “You know what’s a really [Broomlet] type thing to have? That. And when people see that I have it…”

BETH Have you ever had the thought, “That’s a really [Broomlet] type thing to have”?

BROOM Well, recently, in the search for self. And I’m disgusted by that thought. That’s not how you find yourself. But when I was a kid — I mean, sometimes I’d find a book at the store and think, “I didn’t know this existed but obviously I need to get it because it’s the kind of thing I of course will get.” But that’s a little different from thinking “this fits my portfolio to a T!” I’m pretty far afield here.

ADAM Are you going to put all this stuff in? This is going to be the longest entry ever.

BROOM It’s probably not, unfortunately. I usually talk even more than this.

ADAM Let’s read the New York Times review.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM I just want to remind us that in One Hundred and One Dalmatians they watch a heroic dog TV show where the dog is called Thunderbolt. I thought maybe there’d be a back-reference here that would clarify whether that was where this idea came from. And there was not.

ADAM Maybe they didn’t even know about it.

BETH So A.O. Scott wrote the review of Meet the Robinsons as well, I believe.

BROOM Which was negative.

BETH It was incredibly negative, and suggested that Disney was basically finished. But here he didn’t make any reference to that, or to Disney at all.

ADAM He’s right about the pigeons. I thought it was extremely funny every time the pigeons moved.

BROOM That was actual creative animation.

ADAM It really made them much funnier, when their heads would twist sideways.

BETH It was a really good looking movie.

BROOM I thought Bolt himself was the least good looking thing in it. He looked okay. The whole movie was just fine as one of these things. And maybe the next movie, or the one after that, will say, “they don’t have to be these things anymore! Our standards can go up!”

ADAM I doubt it.

ADAM That one felt like it was for littler kids than any we’ve seen so far.

BETH That’s interesting.

ADAM I’ve said before that when I was twelve, I really loved the fast-talking vaudevillian patter of Tiny Toons, and this had that same sort of fast quipping… 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. The Disney Channel is for pre-teens now. I don’t know when that happened.

BETH But you started out by saying that it was for littler kids than any we’ve seen.

ADAM Well, what I mean is, I feel like as kids get more advanced in general, littler kids are aspiring to this grown-up style patter. Which ultimately is a tell that the movie is for little kids. Does that make sense?

BROOM You’re saying that our concept of childhood sophistication has generally risen, so that the level of sophistication seen here now corresponds to a younger age level.

ADAM I guess so. But maybe that means that the whole idea of a Disney movie for all ages of children is totally defunct. Maybe I should revise and extend: it’s obviously not for five-year-olds, but…

BROOM Why isn’t it?

BETH I think it is.

ADAM Well, Eddie wouldn’t get any of the fast talking.

BROOM What “fast talking” are you talking about? There was certainly fast stuff, but it was fast, like, peanut-butter machines and dinosaurs.

ADAM “Fast talking” isn’t right. When the dinosaur says “I have a big head and tiny arms. This plan wasn’t thought through very well.” That’s the sort of thing that as a ten-year-old I would just fallen out of my chair at.

BROOM Well, there are some layers there. Because that joke is a very modern, post-Friends kind of joke, but it’s being delivered in the same slot as a typical Looney Tunes “grown-up joke.”

ADAM But the joke isn’t actually funny enough for a grown-up to find funny. In Shrek, or in Dumbo for that matter, in many of these there have been jokes for grown-ups. These were jokes that were pretending to be jokes for grown-ups but were actually for little kids.

BETH I think what’s going on there is that the animators have a less sophisticated sense of humor, and are making themselves laugh with jokes that are less grown up.

BROOM That’s what I mean by post-Friends. In Looney Tunes, the cartoon was for kids but it also had references to stuff from adult culture. That’s why you loved Tiny Toons, because it made you feel grown up when things were presented as grown-up jokes. And I think today, actual grown-up jokes are dumber. Grown-up humor has degraded; it has a very strong infantile strain.

BETH I totally think that’s what’s happened.

BROOM The dinosaur joke is a perfect example, because first of all it was a callback to the frog saying the same thing.

ADAM I got that!

BROOM And the joke is a now-standard one, where casual tone punctures genre tone.

ADAM Breaking the fourth wall of the genre, yeah.

BROOM So that’s become a thing these days. It counts as a grown-up joke.

ADAM The jokes in Emperor’s New Groove are actually for grown-ups. They’re jokes that little kids wouldn’t get. Whereas this is not actually for grown-ups.

BROOM That very same joke is in The Emperor’s New Groove. Toward the end, when they drop a bunch of potions of different animals and the guards turn into an octopus and a cow and an ostrich and whatever. And she shouts “get after them!” and the cow raises his hand and says “excuse me, I’ve been turned into a cow, may I go home?” And she says “Yes, you may go. Anyone else?” and the rest of them say “No, we’re good.” It’s exactly the same beat. Why are you sighing? Are you sighing that I remembered that?

ADAM Partly.

BROOM What’s the other part?

ADAM I’m grappling with my feelings here. Because this really is the prevailing mode on the Disney Channel today. Knowingness that is totally wholesome.

BROOM What was “knowing” about this movie?

ADAM I mean meta-ness.

BETH Like the Frank Sinatra frogs.

ADAM Or the fact that the Snidely Whiplash character is stupid and has to puzzle out really obvious things.

BROOM That’s not “knowing,” that’s just silly comedy.

ADAM “Knowing” isn’t the right word; but it’s meta-, it’s referential. It’s not just slipping on a banana peel.

BROOM Well, the humor on Sesame Street in 1980 was in exactly the same spirit. “Kermit the Frog here, reporting from Little Miss Muffet’s tuffet,” or whatever, and Little Miss Muffet is modern or casual. I mean, it goes back to Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood, where the wolf goes to a club and Little Red does a sexy number. Your idea that anything that winks is contemporary and Disney Channel just isn’t true. This seemed to me to be pitched very much at the Sesame Street level.

ADAM But that’s what I mean when I say it’s for little kids. It’s not actually contemporary. That’s what I mean by the wholesomeness. It’s been scrubbed of all actual subversiveness and it’s just silly, fast…

BROOM You’re using the word “scrubbed” like it’s some kind of antiseptic modern-day offense. But I felt like this came by its innocence from the right angle. I found it sympathetic.

BETH I guess you’re saying that movies like The Emperor’s New Groove were a little more…

ADAM Hostile.

BROOM Well, David Spade saying “No touchy! No touchy!” is tonally different. Because it comes from a more uptight aspect of adulthood. I don’t just mean because saying “No touchy” is itself uptight, I mean the spirit of referring to anxieties in this dismissive way. The other aspect of Friends is the all the snark and the snark on snark. “Could these adults be any snarkier to each other?” Whereas here the adult references were just to benign stuff.

ADAM Yeah, there was no snark here at all.

BROOM And I totally am for it. I found this movie very sympathetic. When you say this movie is for five-year-olds…

ADAM I said ten-year-olds.

BROOM Well, then we also said five-year-olds. And I think they successfully made a movie for a range of ages, that five- to twelve-year-olds could all enjoy.

BETH Five to ten.

BROOM Well, I enjoyed it.

BETH I enjoyed it too, 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.

BROOM But you know, that’s exactly why I’m for it…

BETH I’m able to be angry about it too, but that’s the way kids are…

BROOM Not just to be angry and political about it, but in defense of my own interests as a kid. I know we were growing up in a different time and maybe my interests would be different if I were growing up now. But they wouldn’t necessarily. When we went to see a screening of old Sesame Street bits at BAM, the guy from the Children’s Television Workshop who was introducing them said “most of these aren’t in rotation anymore because as kids have changed over the years, Sesame Street has changed along with them.” And I thought “That’s so stupid! Kids haven’t changed!” That’s exactly it. Kids don’t change, just our ideas about them change. Four-year-olds are four years old, so the amount of culture they’ve taken in is limited.

BETH Well, technology has such a big influence. They’re being exposed to so many things. Yes, kids fundamentally don’t change, but what culture is doing to them changes them.

ADAM Yeah. Fifteen-year-old girls used to play with dolls.

BROOM I think they still would now if they had not been shamed out of it. And I’m sure that some, who are not as deeply affected by a world of shaming, still do. And we don’t tend to talk about that because the media, “the culture,” is full of people who’ve been shamed out of things. It becomes self-fulfilling. But I think innocence persists into teenage years, even now. Maybe in smaller numbers, maybe more quietly. But I certainly don’t think innocence is a calculation that can no longer afford to be made.

ADAM Beth, you’ve got a potential home-schooler on your hands here.

BROOM No, I’m saying the opposite. I’m not saying we need to hide from the evil culture; I’m saying you can hold out whatever you want to hold out. I just reject this idea that “well, this movie didn’t work because it wasn’t knowing enough for kids these days.” That can still be fine for some kids these days, if it’s done in the right spirit. I mean, I had some issues with the execution, and some story choices, some longeurs…

ADAM I didn’t mean for this to dominate the conversation. What were your issues?

BROOM Well, my experience wasn’t really determined by the things I took issue with. I basically found it appealing. Because I felt that 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 like a children’s book, a book basically about play. And then the obligatory moral and feeling they added into that sat pretty well with it.

BETH I agree.

BROOM The lessons, that you’re always free to take responsibility for yourself…

BETH And that it’s okay to fail.

BROOM And that no matter how zany your worldview is, you can have a happy home that matches it. That all seemed good to me.

BETH Yeah, I thought it had a great message.

ADAM I agree with that part.

BROOM I was very moved by the moment when the bad guy no longer knew what to do with himself. I thought the movie as a whole was sweet and fun. It reminded me of A Town Called Panic, which was sort of the European equivalent of this same spirit of play. All the kooky craziness really did seem like a kid’s kooky craziness, and I appreciated being brought there.

ADAM Didn’t you think the sequence that actually came from the book was the weakest? The actual introduction to the zany family, the meeting of the Robinsons? You guys didn’t like that! We were all rolling our eyes at that.

BROOM I wasn’t rolling my eyes!

BETH I was a little bit rolling my eyes.

BROOM I wasn’t. I was surprised at that point, to discover the territory we were heading into. The spirit of that place wasn’t what we expect in these movies, and that whole sequence to me was like the discovery that I was in the company people who were going to say “kooky crazy stuff is fun!” I felt like the sequence was them saying, “yes, we really mean this! We are doing this very intentionally!” Up until that point their intentions weren’t quite clear.

ADAM It had a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse quality to it.

BROOM Yeah, very much.

ADAM But Pee-Wee’s Playhouse creeped me out as a child. I always thought that felt like an unsafe place to be.

BROOM That show had a subversive stratum to it. And this didn’t.

ADAM This wasn’t particularly attractive to look at. There were large stretches of CGI background where they didn’t bother to put stuff. Every time they were in a background that wasn’t a building, it was like, “well, it’s either grass or sky.”

BROOM I thought that had a deliberate children’s book purity. It seemed relevant to the cheery outlook.

BETH 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.

ADAM You guys really liked it? I don’t know.

BROOM You don’t have to like it.

BETH I don’t have a problem with it.

ADAM Did you see the twist coming? Spoiler alert!

BROOM I saw both twists coming.

ADAM I never bother to think ahead, but there are only so many characters in the movie. Once it became clear that it was a movie about time travel, how many choices do you have?

BROOM Right.

ADAM So… I don’t have a lot else to say. I guess science is cool. That’s good.

BROOM It wasn’t about actual science. It was about the idea of being a brilliant inventor.

BETH I don’t like the use of pop songs in these movies.

BROOM That was one of the things that I considered a problem with execution. Rufus Wainwright really didn’t work.

BETH He had no place here.

BROOM And that came really early on, and it really seemed like the movie was going to fail.

BETH It’s interesting that the Broadway-style songs, even though they’re equally cheesy, somehow aren’t as jarring.

BROOM I’m not sure a Beauty and the Beast-style song would have just fallen into place here, but it would probably have worked better. Because those songs are open; they actually say what’s going on. Like I said about Brother Bear, it’s weird when a song over a montage “just happens to be” a relevant pop song. And this one really was just a pop song, it was definitely not about building a mind-reading device in an orphanage. And with Rufus Wainwright, everything is so utterly about him. It doesn’t feel like he could possibly be singing or thinking about anything other than himself. It certainly didn’t feel like he was singing about Jimmy Neutron. (I know Jimmy Neutron is an entirely different property, but come on.)

ADAM This was executive produced by John Lasseter, as I learned in the credits. So does this really feel like they brought Disney studios back? Or does this feel like some sort of orphan cousin to the Pixar movies?

BROOM Well, it didn’t feel like the descendant of Chicken Little. Yeah, a little bit like a Pixar loan-out. But it had its own look and feel. It didn’t feel like it took place in the world of any other movie, quite. It reminded me, like I said, of children’s books, and I thought that even before I remembered that it was based on a William Joyce book. It had a certain feel, even though at first I really didn’t care about the plot. By the end I did.

ADAM Yeah, it got better toward the end.

BROOM Also, being sleep-deprived as I am, I’m emotionally more open. I felt ready to let there be emotions in this, and found that there were some. I thought it was interesting that they set up this ultimate prize of meeting his mother in the past, and then the message at the end is that the past is really not the point. I found much of it emotionally real.

ADAM I thought the evil bowler hat was funny.

BROOM I thought the bad guy was very funny. I liked the way he moved. There was a lot of animation flair, without seeming like nerdy animation stuff, as it often does.

ADAM Yeah. I don’t know, when he got to the house and there were identical twin uncles living in the planters, I felt like, “I can’t deal with this.”

BROOM I liked that!

BETH I liked it too!

BROOM I thought it was particularly funny when they come back later and instead of hearing the other doorbell you hear the same one again. You didn’t like those guys? That was one of my favorite bits!

ADAM They were worse than the Canadian moose in Brother Bear.

BETH I really disagree with that!

BROOM Obviously they weren’t! It seems strange to me that you put these things all in the same pot, because it seemed clear to me that this was a different pot. And you could say “well, I don’t like that pot either,” but it’s not the same pot!

ADAM As Brother Bear?

BROOM Or as the Disney teen shows that were the first thing you brought up. I understand that both things could be described as “strangely clean,” but this seemed to be explicitly offering “strangely clean” as the world of imagination. The Disney channel is strangely clean while purporting to be “Life as a kid! Which happens to be perfect!”

ADAM You really think Hannah Montana is supposed to be “life”? It’s just as overtly fantastical.

BROOM Oh, come on, she doesn’t teach frogs to sing!

ADAM But she’s a pop star!

BROOM But that’s a craven, worldly fantasy. This was like playing with Legos. That’s all about, like, being sexy, whether or not they acknowledge it. That’s a princess fantasy. This wasn’t a princess fantasy at all; it was the classic Harry Potter fantasy: “Where do I belong?” “You belong in a wonderful place!” And how is that wonderful place defined? Totally whimsical terms that have nothing to do with worldly achievements. It was about familial love and, like, toys.

BETH Okay, let’s read the review.

[we begin looking it up]

BROOM I was so worried that was going to suck, and it didn’t, and now I feel like we’re home free.

BETH I do too. I’m excited.

BROOM So it turns out the three we picked for our day of shitty ones were the right ones. This was much better than Brother Bear.

ADAM Chicken Little is clearly the nadir.

BROOM The absolute worst.

BETH One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

ADAM This was obviously head and shoulders better than Chicken Little. No question.

[we read the very negative review]

BROOM I often enjoy A.O. Scott’s mean reviews, and I enjoyed that even as I thought he got it totally wrong. The key to his getting it wrong is when he says that the future “is badly scaled.” No! It was very much intentional that things would be grand and fantastical. It takes place in imagination space, in the mind; vast expanses are part of that!

ADAM I think he’s referring to the large swaths of empty grass and sky that I mentioned.

BROOM That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Large swaths of empty grass and sky is a classic image of the idyll of the imagination.

BETH Yeah. That’s what my Lego creations would look like. Big expanses of grass with almost nothing on them. Those are the lands that I made up for myself as a child. I understand.

BROOM And when you see it, does it not evoke something for you?

BETH Yes.

BROOM For me it ties into very basic kinds of fantasy sense-of-space things. If he can’t understand that, of course he doesn’t get it, because the whole movie was on that level.

BETH Adam agrees with A.O.

ADAM No, I don’t. I thought it was head and shoulders above Chicken Little, but that’s because I thought Chicken Little was contemptible. This had its heart in the right place and was intermittently amusing. And there was a consistency of character here.

BROOM Let me just note that the plot of this movie was the same as Back to the Future Part II.

BETH You were supposed to know that. It was clear.

BROOM Did you think that’s why there was that scene of the frogs locking the hat in the trunk? It’s a reference to Back to the Future because the whole movie has been Back to the Future?

BETH Yeah.

ADAM Do you ascribe any validity to A.O.’s complaint that everything here is utterly derivative?

BROOM I feel like again it’s a misunderstanding of why it’s all here. Yes, it’s derivative, because that’s a part of playtime.

BETH And not only that, it’s a part of contemporary comedy.

BROOM But, again, I didn’t see it that way — I had the same experience with Shrek, where some people were saying it was just typical rehashed nerdified comedy, but I just didn’t see it. In Shrek 2 I saw it.

BETH Well, I felt like the Tom Selleck joke here was an example of that.

BROOM I accepted that because it seemed like the only one of its kind. It came as a complete surprise and so it had some power. Whereas in Chicken Little they were making that joke every second. And then, after all, it really was Tom Selleck!

ADAM I will say that I was pleased that there was no wiseacre sidekick. Nobody had to listen to Wanda Sykes. I just made up that casting, but it’s a good idea, isn’t it! There were no fart jokes at all. Thank you. This is what I mean about it being for little kids.

BROOM But you can’t have your farts and eat them too! It had no fart jokes in it, which is what you want, so…

ADAM Little little kids aren’t interested in fart jokes. Disgusting fourteen-year-old boys like fart jokes.

BETH I think around the age of seven or eight you start liking fart jokes.

BROOM Your analysis of it is essentially removed from any standard. You don’t think it’s good for fourteen-year-olds to be served fart jokes, but you’re also saying, “well, it didn’t have fart jokes so it’s no good for fourteen-year-olds.”

ADAM No no, I’m pleased that it didn’t have any fart jokes.

BROOM But then you say that’s why it’s “for little kids”!

ADAM I don’t like fourteen-year-olds either! I’m not being critical when I say it’s for little kids.

BETH But do fourteen-year-olds ever watch Disney movies? I certainly didn’t.

ADAM We did.

BETH Okay. I’m sorry.

BROOM That’s why you hadn’t seen any of these great films before.

ADAM How old were we when The Lion King came out? Fifteen.

BROOM I think the last one I saw unreservedly in the theater was Aladdin.

BETH Mine was Little Mermaid.

ADAM Mine was Wreck-It Ralph.

Nadir-Fest 3 of 3!

ADAM That was contemptible. That was awful. That was unquestionably the worst one.

BETH By far the worst.

ADAM I could make a BuzzFeed-style list of twenty-five things that I hated about that movie.

BETH Let’s start.

BROOM Go for it.

ADAM Well… you were talking the other day about being in a visual world where it feels like no one is home and no one is watching out for you. It really felt like that. Sorry, my thoughts are all clotted up, I’m so angry about this movie.

BROOM “You need some closure.”

ADAM The contemptible message of the movie. The father-son dynamic. The absurd gay stereotype… At least at the end he got to sing along to a Gloria Gaynor song; that must have been exciting for his character. I’m sorry, somebody else jump in here, because I’m just pissed off.

BETH I’m only angry that I had to watch it. I’m not necessarily angry about it. But it was terrible. 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.

ADAM It had that manic knowingness and topicality that is like a noxious growth in these kinds of animated movies in recent years. It was obviously way too expensive.

BETH So did they fire all their animators and hire a whole new team?

BROOM It’s a very different sort of skill; I don’t imagine there are that many traditional animators who also do CGI animation. I’m not sure where these people came from. They’re not Pixar people.

BETH It seemed like they had a totally different sensibility from Disney people.

BROOM When you said that this was totally nerdy, I feel like that is exactly the essence of it. And Adam, when you said this was like my prior comment about entering a world where there’s no love for you, that’s not the feeling I get from this movie. That’s the feeling I get from movies that I feel have been made by sleaze, by calculating men of a certain insensitivity.

ADAM I just meant that it felt visually unwelcoming.

BROOM I said during the movie that this movie was made by its characters, grown up. Here I felt I was in the company not of sleaze but of stunted nerds.

ADAM That offensive opening, when they’re like, “Once upon a time — Naw!” … “Let’s open the book — Naw! Enough wit’ da book!”

BROOM You said it seemed like an identity crisis.

ADAM They might as well have had Gilbert Gottfried as the father. It was gruesome.

BROOM I really feel confident that behind this I can sense nerds. People who find it a strain to think about emotions. I feel like they strained to the point they could reach, and then had this inspiration: “Hey, you know what I might want to make a movie about? How my father never believed in me, and no-one was ever nice to me, and I was just an innocent nerd who liked karaoke, or was gay, or wasn’t good at sports or something. You know how no-one in the entire town liked me? We should make a movie about that!” And then they started to sketch out how that would work, but they don’t really understand it.

BETH Yeah, it’s Asperger’s-y! The whole movie was really Asperger’s-y! And that’s why it was so hard to watch.

BROOM Yes. All of the “humor,” all of the constant references — it’s like a Rainman thing. It’s what nerds do. It’s why they keep reciting Monty Python skits to each other. “No one understands us… but, well, you know what they say in Star Wars!” And it was striking to me that the elements of the movie that felt most expert were the weird sci-fi elements that never belonged in this story in the first place. The spaceship comes down and suddenly it’s like, “oh, look at this, something they really thought about!”

BETH Because that’s what’s comfortable for them.

BROOM That’s who they were. And I think the movie was uncomfortable to watch exactly because it was by nerds who were 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 that movie.

BETH They haven’t really resolved it for themselves.

ADAM And their vision of social acceptance is “It’s two strikes at the bottom of the ninth! Will he make it?” That was just a piece of scissored-out movie from some other movie that was inserted here. It felt so hackneyed, which fits with your thesis.

BROOM But they knew what that was. That was intentional. They put the “end of the movie triumph” at the beginning, and then they had him and his father lying there saying “Everything’s great now, right?” And the point is obviously it’s not great, nothing’s been addressed. But then the actual closure they give at the end is still totally insufficient. During the movie I said that they needed to make the father admit that he had felt the same kind of shame and that’s why he was passing it on to his son. But he didn’t! He didn’t understand himself at all, he didn’t explain anything. And when he finally turned it around and said “I believe in you,” he still didn’t actually believe in him! He just had come to realize that being a father meant that he had to say “I believe in you.” The writers couldn’t imagine any greater, more authentic kind of support from this terrible parent.

ADAM Who greenlighted this? Who thought that this was going to sell, or promote the brand?

BETH I think they just went through a lost era in the mid 2000s.

BROOM Didn’t we all?

BETH Michael Eisner was sort of called out for letting the brand get out of control, and… did they fire him or something?

BROOM I don’t know. You might be confusing different stories, because I know that some time earlier than that, Roy Disney was protesting to the board along the lines that the Disney ABC lineup was bad for the Disney brand, that they should save the word Disney for features, that they should save the characters and not stick them on sitcom promos…

BETH Okay, before you post this I’m going to find what I think I remember. [ed: put it in the comments, kiddo!]

ADAM Do you 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?

BROOM What year was Adaptation?

BETH ’02.

BROOM Because that makes fun of the phenomenon outright, and it seemed relevant at the time. It’s died down since then. So this was particularly late. It was just fodder for their compulsion to emulate things — like the joke at the end about how Hollywood would make their movie. Well, that’s how Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure ends, among many other things, so it’s not even their joke. They didn’t own any of it.

ADAM “You’ve got hate mail!” AOL was of course 10 years old, at this point. Nobody had AOL in 2005. That’s the sort of thing that made me say that the people who made this movie not only were nerds but also were a thousand years old. “Kids use cellphones! Let’s put that in the movie!”

BROOM It’s really a whole attitude toward what humor is. Was there a single joke in this movie that did not consist of taking a chunk of existing reference material and putting it in the movie?

ADAM “Oh, snap!”

BROOM “Oh, snap!” Exactly. That’s something people say. It is like Asperger’s: “I’ve heard humans do this!” That’s how nerds talk to each other. They’re comforted by doing it to each other. 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.

ADAM “Modern Mallard says…” Ugh.

BROOM I appreciated that Ugly Duckling here was really just kind of an ugly duck.

BETH Instead of a cute nerdy girl.

BROOM Well, the point is that the ugly duckling is going to grow up to be a swan and is just in the wrong family. This is a movie about nerds as kids, and they were saying “yeah, we were ugly.”

ADAM But at least when this movie was called Mean Girls, the characters were actually warm and relatable.

BROOM They just don’t know what that is. And when you said there was gay-baiting in it, I don’t think so. I think they worked on it. I think that guy was there making the movie and was thrilled to have a character shout, “My Streisand records!”

ADAM I appreciate that it was not hateful gay-baiting. It was meant to be affectionate. But it was just…

BETH It was just clueless.

ADAM Uuuuugh.

BROOM I knew this was going to be the one. I knew this was coming. What I’m worried about is that — despite this having been our day of terror — the next one might be related to this in tone.

ADAM You think we picked the wrong three?

BROOM We couldn’t have improved it, because Home on the Range was the better one. Brother Bear was pretty bad.

ADAM That’s true. Well, we did it.

[we read the Times review]

ADAM I think it’s fitting that the first third of that review read like it came from the business section. As you say, nerds made this movie, but the people who approved it are just evil suits who have no sense of what is humanly compelling.

BROOM I was a little bit stung when you said that Home on the Range didn’t work because it didn’t promote any brands. Because to me, that’s suit thinking. And it’s probably true to some degree… but deep down, the reason that Dumbo and Pinocchio work is not because they were smarter about what they could sell to people, but because they were smarter about what would make a good movie. And yes, it happens that Home on the Range picked a way of making an entertaining movie that doesn’t fit that particular mold. But you wish that they could just think, “if we make a movie that really works as a movie, people will like that and good will come of it.”

ADAM Well look, over at Pixar they’re making movies of things that are not obviously marketable. I mean, Cars is, but Up is not, and Ratatouille is not.

BROOM Wall-E certainly isn’t. That was a very peculiar movie.

ADAM And I get that. But Disney being the franchise that it is, they have to be “Disney movies” if the franchise is going to survive. But this wasn’t that either! Who thinks “Oh, the beloved fairy tale Chicken Little“? What the fuck?

BROOM What is the real story of Chicken Little?

ADAM There isn’t one.

BROOM “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That’s about it, right?

ADAM “Let’s make a movie about the Tortoise and the Hare. And the hare will be fast talking, maybe Eddie Murphy will play the hare…”

BROOM Ooh, I like it!

ADAM And the tortoise will be, like,…

BROOM Bill Murray.

ADAM And the tortoise will have a sidekick, like a talking carrot…

BROOM But in the modern day, why does the hare go so fast? He’s trying to be cool and hip but he’s overcompensating. And he’ll learn to relax from the tortoise.

ADAM And then maybe everyone thinks the hare won the race, and he’ll be on a billboard, and it’ll be very meta. There’ll be “Hare” products…

BROOM But then they’ll have some common enemy. You think of them as enemies, but it’s going to be a buddy movie in the end. Because they’ll have to work together to fight off some kind of common enemy. Maybe there’s a bear, or some kind of big monster that they both need to go after. Or Russians, or Arabs or something, that they have to join forces against.

ADAM I’m embarrassed that Sandra Tsing Loh worked on this movie.

BETH This is going to get one star in my Netflix account.

BROOM Rotten Tomatoes reported that 36% of critics gave this a positive review.

ADAM Who? Read me a positive review.

BROOM Well, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe said that the film was “shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances.” And Angel Cohn of TV Guide gave the film 3 stars alluding the film that would “delight younger children with its bright colors and constant chaos, while adults are likely to be charmed by the witty banter, subtle one-liners and a sweet father-son relationship.”

ADAM Ugh.

BROOM Angel Cohn was later found to be dead and blind.

ADAM Also, Zach Braff is as annoying as he is thought to be.

BROOM He was putting on a stupid little character voice. So why did they even hire Zach Braff?

ADAM If there’s anything good to say here, it’s that now you know which is the worst one, when people ask.

BROOM I already knew, though. Guys, I had seen a little bit of this on Youtube already, and seen that they used the rolling ball clip from Raiders of the Lost Ark within the first fifteen seconds of the movie.

ADAM When the water tower was rolling, it was like, “Ugh, they’re doing Raiders of the Lost Ark.” And then OH WAIT, we’re in a movie theater actually showing Raiders of the Lost Ark!

BROOM And even that — the actual ball rolling through the screen showing Raiders of the Lost Ark — even that itself is an existing lame thing that they didn’t make up.

ADAM I wish there had been more modern catchphrases in this movie. What if Chicken Little had been able to say to his father “Homey don’t play dat”?

BROOM Yeah! “Cowabunga, dude!”

Nadir-Fest part 2 of 3!

ADAM I liked that!

BETH I did too.

BROOM Yeah, it was fine.

BETH It was so much more fun than Brother Bear.

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

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

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

ADAM Much more star-studded!

BETH Judi Dench!

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

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

BETH She was good!

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

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

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

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

BROOM Right, she’s a slummer.

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

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

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

BETH It did.

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

BETH Yes, and his coloring.

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

BETH I have no knowledge of Spongebob.

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

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

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

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

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

ADAM Nutsy.

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

BETH I have no problem with this movie.

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

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

BROOM It’s entirely possible.

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

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

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

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

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

BETH It’s over kids’ heads.

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

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

BETH That was awesome!

BROOM The color-changing sequence?

BETH Yes. It was great.

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

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

BETH I still enjoyed it.

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

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

ADAM Who are the bad guys in that?

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

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

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

ADAM In the middle of a closing room? No.

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

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

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

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

BETH The Lisa Kudrow character.

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

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

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

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

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

BETH Maybe they were.

BROOM Like when it went to widescreen for no reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BETH 75.

BROOM It felt very short.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BETH Which is fun.

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

BETH Developed over time, though.

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

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

ADAM She got better.

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

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

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

BROOM That’s what this was, entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

BETH It was just painless.

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

ADAM I’m still dreading Chicken Little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADAM But it was adequate.

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM It was pleasant.

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

ADAM On to the next!

[Nadir-Fest part 1 of 3! We subjected ourselves to an all-afternoon triple-header viewing session intended to get us through a dreaded low point as quickly as possible. Parts 2 and 3 to follow.]

BROOM Our day of bad movies has begun correctly. The ways in which this was bad…

ADAM Were manifold.

BROOM … and also surprising to me. I found myself thinking about how a project like this comes to fail, because I think this movie failed, and yet I don’t think the initial impetus was doomed. I don’t think that every element of it was incompetent. It just didn’t work, and I found myself thinking managerially, imagining that I was working on it and knowing that it was going bad, and thinking, “What do I do? What is the key thing to do to try to make this better?”

ADAM Let’s start by saying what was good about it. Because I thought it was really lovely to look at it. They just went out of their way to make it lovely.

BETH I think they were pretty proud of that, too.

BROOM I thought the coloring looked blatantly like it had been done on a computer. The flat way that it was colored, but especially the crappy rounding shadows that looked like they had been applied in Photoshop. And I thought the foreground lay against the background in a dead-looking way.

ADAM Well, maybe I don’t have the technical competence to see that, but I thought that compared to, say, the way that Pocahontas thought it was lovely, this was actually much prettier to look at. There were a lot of satisfying touches, like the way they changed colors in the early morning light.

BETH I thought some of that was a little incompetent. But 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 strange and wrong. They were trying for accuracy and not hitting it, but being very overt about the attempt.

BROOM Are you talking about that mottled-light tree effect?

BETH Yes!

BROOM That was the first time I thought, “that’s an animation special effect, and it’s not entirely working.”

ADAM What was this?

BETH Early on, they were walking through sort of a sun-dappled forest landscape, and they were, you know, all splotchy, and it didn’t work. But it was interesting that they were trying.

BROOM I’m surprised that you thought the palettes were good. To me they were, like many aspects of the movie, a case of “I can see what you’re trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work.”

ADAM Well, look at those fish [in the animated DVD menu still onscreen], for example.

BETH This particular palette is kind of awful, but…

BROOM Well, it seems characteristic to me. The colors were all sort of tasteless, cheesy. It’s like you’re at a Disneyworld hotel, and everything’s some kind of souped-up salmon color.

BETH It’s like one of those moving “paintings” at a Chinese restaurant. Of a waterfall.

BROOM On a video screen, you mean?

BETH Kind of, but it’s not really on a video screen. It’s like a “moving painting.” Do you know what I’m talking about?

BROOM I think so. I’m not sure I’m picturing exactly what you are, but that kind of restaurant world of taste, and lack of taste, is how I felt about the way this looked. Someone’s idea of beauty was being played out, sort of, but it didn’t feel sharp.

ADAM The color palette was very unlike the color palette in your apartment.

BETH I just liked that they were being daring and diverse.

BROOM I agree for obvious reasons that it’s appropriate to compare this movie to Pocahontas. And I actually thought the palette was the strongest thing Pocahontas had going for it. The bold illustration style of Pocahontas is much more appealing to me than this touchy-feely pastel world.

BETH But as a child, watching the colors in this movie, I would have been riveted, because every shot was different, had different colors, and that’s enough to keep me watching.

ADAM As I child I was offended by when the Smurfs would go walking in the forest and it was just the same four trees rotated over and over. I think I would have been captivated by all the effort that went into this.

BROOM It has a kind of abundance, certainly. But especially with the presence of CGI elements — like that rippling water in the menu — my eye feels like there are actually too many colors there. There’s a certain sense of artistic care that comes of things being really chosen, whereas here it felt like there was just a lot of stuff.

BETH I agree with you as a grown-up. But as a kid, I think I would be taken with it.

ADAM Before we get into the things that didn’t work, was there anything else that worked?

BROOM Much as during The Fox and the Hound, which this resembled, I felt like the setup itself was promising. There were moments when I was sincerely thinking about the storyline and the substance. People from two different worlds; how are they going to relate? Being forced to empathize with your supposed enemies.

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.

BROOM Which was more politically offensive, this or Pocahontas?

ADAM It’s interesting — 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.

BROOM I feel like we’re in pretty much the same dimension here as there.

ADAM Yeah, we’re talking about two “Great Spirit” movies. Maybe I’m teasing out distinctions that aren’t there.

BETH Maybe it feels like they should have known better by now.

ADAM It felt like they had a lot of Native American consultants working on this movie. There was probably a lot of very studied attention to dignified detail about Native Americans’ lives. Even though the characters were all named after cities in Alaska.

BROOM Pocahontas was more explicitly sanctimonious about multiculturalism. This was a movie about universal empathy. I felt like the construction of this movie had more to do with basic human issues than the construction of Pocahontas.

ADAM That was about the clash of two different cultures, yes.

BROOM This one is basically the same concept as in The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin turns him into animals so he can learn about life as an animal. So of their two “Indian” movies, this one felt less offensive to me as far as its Indianness.

ADAM Pocahontas just seemed a little daffier. It was less self-important, and thus easier to take.

BROOM Yes, its ridiculous musical sequences were at least a spectacle, unlike these.

ADAM “Did you ever hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?” I mean…!

BROOM The thing is, that’s kind of a catchy song, by comparison… Pocahontas is one of the very worst movies in the entire sequence thus far, I would say, and this project resembled it somewhat, but it failed in different ways.

ADAM 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.

BROOM Well, I think that’s the dimension in which the movie failed most significantly: it’s supposed to be all about character, and they didn’t give us real character. Not even in the designs.

BETH They hardly distinguished them. I didn’t even know who the main character was until the other one died.

BROOM A time-honored technique for directing the audience’s attention! Yeah, the dead one was the most charismatic of the three. And then the hero’s journey of discovery is supposed to be about him being a teenager who thinks he has all the answers but doesn’t, and 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!” That was it, and that’s why this was super-boring.

ADAM Did you like Tanana?

BROOM The grandmother? No.

ADAM She was only onscreen for about thirty seconds, which was weird. I thought she was going to come back in some way. I guess she comes back at the very very end.

BROOM Her design was gross. Her eyes were too big and her face was funny. I didn’t like her.

BETH I didn’t dislike her.

ADAM Did you like the little bro’ bear? I must say I found him sort of appealing and cute.

BETH I found him annoying.

ADAM It was too much, but there were aspects of him that got me. I teared up a little at the end.

BROOM Is that true? You don’t need to be ashamed about it.

ADAM I was embarrassed, but…

BETH No, it’s good!

BROOM Which part of the end?

ADAM When he decided to stay a bear!

BROOM You teared up because of the emotion of that? I was truly shocked by it.

BETH I was too.

BROOM It seemed like the wrong ending.

ADAM Can we talk about that?

BROOM and BETH Yes!

ADAM It is really weird, first of all. But maybe it’s just our human prejudice that makes us assume it’s better to be a human than a bear.

BETH But this guy has lived all of his life, except for a couple weeks, as a human.

ADAM He did look better as a bear.

BROOM Everyone looked better as a bear. The humans were all unappealing.

ADAM And he did have to atone in some way for killing Koda’s mother. It wouldn’t have been right to just leave Koda to his own devices after having killed his mother.

BROOM Did you get the impression that becoming a bear was presented as a noble sacrifice?

BETH No. He preferred being a bear.

ADAM It was like what’s-his-name staying on the Avatar planet at the end. Or like the Swiss family Robinson staying on the island.

BROOM But when I watch Close Encounters and he gets on that ship at the end, he’s done with planet Earth, I think, “whoa! I don’t know if that’s gonna work out for you!” And here, there was that, plus above and beyond that… The whole movie is presented as a coming-of-age story; like in The Sword in the Stone, this is all his education. You become an animal to learn something about God’s creation. But with this ending it seemed like they didn’t understand that, so the moral becomes “it’s good to be an animal.” It stops being about learning anything.

BETH Were we supposed to think that he decided to be a bear because he discovered that he loved his little brother bear?

BROOM “He needs me,” is what he said.

ADAM It would have been better if bear-to-human was a portal that they could slide through at will.

BETH It sounds like if you just go up to the top of that mountain you can switch.

BROOM It’s possible that some of these questions are answered in Brother Bear 2.

ADAM I was pleased that there were no overt fart jokes in this movie.

BROOM You’re right. The humor was terrible, but it was not infantile.

BETH But it was really bad.

ADAM The poster is a picture of Kenai and Koda in close-up, and the caption is “Nature Calls,” so I was worried. But it turned out to be more dignified than that.

BROOM Their indulgence of Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis was way out of proportion. I mean, I’ve never thought those guys are funny.

BETH Those guys aren’t funny, and kids, especially, have no reason to think those guys are funny.

ADAM Canadian kids might.

BROOM You did laugh when he said “I love dew.”

BETH I did.

BROOM It was kind of funny. Anyway, I expected this movie to be bad because I expected it to be sanctimonious and grating, and it turned out to be bad because it was just boring. And thin. I felt like pretty much every element wasn’t really at the level of execution they should have held it to.

ADAM It was a writing failure most of all. I mentioned Bongo earlier. What was the plot of Bongo?

BROOM Uh, he’s a circus bear…

ADAM And then he has to go into the woods and be with wild bears, is that right?

BROOM Bears “say it with a slap!” That’s what I remember.

ADAM And it was super-boring.

BROOM Bears are boring!

ADAM Well, I don’t think we’re going to have to encounter them again.

BROOM Talk about Phil Collins a little bit.

BETH Among the worst songs. They’ve been bad for a while, but these were worse.

ADAM They were also surprisingly intrusive. They were just suddenly some Phil Collins extravaganza coming at you, at the worst times. That song about how everything sucks!

BETH There was no subtlety to the lyrics at all.

BROOM My favorite part of watching this was that during Adam’s favorite song he immediately started trying to learn the lyrics so that he could sing along with the choruses.

BETH “This is our festival… and best of all…”

ADAM When I saw that part, I thought, “I don’t want to be in a family with these other weird bears.” All of whom seemed self-absorbed or strange in a way that didn’t really make me want to hang out with them.

BROOM There’s something very odd about this discipline Disney has become dependent on, of having a series of original songs in a non-musical, where the songs have generic lyrics about the generic emotion of the moment — “The songs will not have lyrics alluding to bears, salmon, or fishing, because that would be embarrassing” —

ADAM It wouldn’t be marketable on a CD.

BROOM I think of it as going back to Toy Story, with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” but especially the song he sings when Buzz Lightyear is depressed, about “I won’t go sailing again,” which has to be kind of coy about how it relates to what’s actually going on. Because there are to be no songs explicitly about toys. This movie had four songs in that category. I think they do it because they think it’s less absurd than singing about bears, but it actually becomes more absurd. Here comes Tina Turner singing something — is she singing about this bear movie? Because that would be weird. But is she not singing about this bear movie? Because that’s even weirder! That’s how I felt, especially during that first song — the montage is “Welcome to our beautiful Inuit world,” but the song really didn’t directly support that at all.

ADAM Well, “My Heart Will Go On” isn’t really about the Titanic. And it is not coincidental that “My Heart Will Go On” was an extremely successful radio single.

BROOM There was one song in that movie and you only heard it over the credits. That’s standard.

ADAM You heard it throughout, you just only heard the lyrics over the credits. And, like, what was the song for Pearl Harbor?

BROOM Yeah, but that’s how things have been forever. Since the 60s at least.

ADAM “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing.” [ed.: Armageddon]

BROOM We’re watching a scene where a man who killed a bear and then got turned into a bear is telling the son of the bear he killed that he used to be a man and that he killed his mother. That’s a very weird scene, and it’s the pivotal scene in this movie. And Phil Collins is singing a song as though it’s something you might have heard already on the radio… but it’s about that! When you listen to what he’s saying, he’s definitely singing about this bizarre scenario, but in code! There’s something very strange about that. And those lyrics were really grim. The lyrics of “Theme from Brother Bear” are, like, “There’s no way out of this dark place…”

ADAM Did this movie make you want to be a bear more than before? I would say “yes, a little.”

BETH No.

ADAM But only in prehistoric Alaska. It seemed fun when they were fishing.

BROOM Yes, obviously, being part of their festival seemed like it would have been a good time.

BETH There was a waterslide.

ADAM You’re right, all the landscapes did sort of look like Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

BETH Yeah. But I like that!

ADAM And they have the garish coloration of the line for Splash Mountain.

BROOM Yeah. It felt like a resort. And, I guess, who doesn’t like a resort?

ADAM The color of those rocks in the menu is, like, Dusty Sedona.

BETH It looks almost like an early video game.

ADAM Like “Monkey Island.”

BROOM Yeah, like one of those adventure games. An “I can’t reach that from here” game.

BETH Where they only had thirty-two colors to work with, so they were all very extreme.

BROOM Well, this would be a two-hundred-fifty-six color game.

BETH Sorry!

ADAM VGA.

BROOM That’s right.

ADAM I didn’t detect anything gay in this movie.

BROOM There was no romance of any kind. There were no women.

ADAM There was a little bit of feminine panic at the beginning, when he was like “Love? What a stupid totem!” “Hey, loverboy!”

BROOM I actually thought that was promising! I thought the best thing in the script was that he gets told his totem is love and he’s like, “Ugh, I don’t want that.” I was ready to get on board. I thought, “yeah, it’s going to be about him learning that love is not something mushy to be embarrassed about, it’s a spiritual and important thing.” That seemed like a good theme for a movie. But no.

[the review is read]

ADAM You wanted to talk about the widescreen? [ed. The first 24 minutes are standard ratio; the image becomes widescreen after the character is transformed into a bear]

BROOM Strange gimmick! When there was that message before the movie warning us that it was going to happen, I thought, “This is critic bait, so that there’d be something to write about in the papers. They did this so they could PR it out there that they had done this.” And yet Stephen Holden didn’t even mention it. I feel like I’ve heard of maybe one other movie that changes the aspect ratio in the middle.

BETH I think I’ve seen a movie that does it but I can’t remember what.

BROOM I thought it was going to happen as we watched, that the image would spread and get wider and wider. But no; it went black for five seconds, and then came back at the full ratio with a not-particularly-impressive first shot.

BETH It was a callback to The Wizard of Oz, kind of.

BROOM But I thought it would be like that, where a door opens and something is wonderful on the other side.

BETH Well, his eyes open and he’s sort of blurrily looking around.

ADAM Meh. It was an underwhelming effect for being trumpeted the way it was.

BETH I wanted to mention that there were “handheld” shots during the killing of the bear, which we haven’t seen before.

BROOM Yes, another technical idea that didn’t work.

[as counterpoint we read the heartfelt five-star reader review from the New York Times review page]

ADAM The person who wrote that comment has a “BELIEVE” bumper sticker on the back of their car, with a mandala and a star of David…

BROOM “Recommended by zero Readers.” Well, the point that there is no villain in the movie is well taken. And yet the movie fails, because they didn’t do a good job.

ADAM I kept thinking about William Faulkner’s “The Bear” while I watched this. And I thought, maybe Faulkner could have learned a thing or two. Imagine how that story would have been improved if there had been a bear’s-eye-view chapter. I think I’m done now.

BROOM Yeah, because we have miles to go before we sleep.

ADAM I think the fact that that was surprisingly entertaining is a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, who totally carried this movie.

BROOM I don’t know that it was carried. But I think you’re right.

ADAM It was entirely faithful to the actual plot of Treasure Island, until the end, and surprisingly compelling. It wasn’t Disney-stupid-plotted, the way they all are.

BETH So why isn’t it more revered?

BROOM I would ask “Why isn’t it more good?” Are you suggesting that this movie deserves a better reputation?

BETH Well…

ADAM It wasn’t a world-class movie, but it was solid. I was entertained the entire time.

BETH I was entertained by it.

BROOM I found it so weird. Did you guys not have the experience I had that this was super super weird? I get that it was in outer space, but it was a weird outer space that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know what the rules were.

ADAM I stopped worrying about that halfway through, when I decided it was “steampunk,” rather than just nonsensical. A steampunk Treasure Island is a great idea.

BROOM It wasn’t really steampunk, though. It was just whatever they thought of. And the stuff they thought of was weird! 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. I thought you guys were going to feel the same way!

BETH I just accepted it on its own terms. The thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was just like my brother.

ADAM He was?

BETH He looked like my brother as a teenager. He had my brother’s hair and some of his personality, and the song was like something my brother would have played on his guitar.

ADAM And it felt weird because you were crushing on him a little bit, right?

BETH No!

ADAM Hear her guilty laugh?

BROOM I think it’s just an uncomfortable laugh.

BETH Unlike you, Adam, I don’t get crushes on cartoon characters.

BROOM And you would tell us if you did.

BETH I would. I would admit it.

ADAM It did bother me at the beginning that there were no coherent rules of space and time.

BROOM There were no rules of anything. Like, what is normal and what isn’t? When you go on an adventure within a fantasy world, there needs to be a sense of what is out of the ordinary for the characters. In Star Wars, when they go to the port city, they make very clear that “this is a sleazy and dangerous place,” and when you see all kinds of aliens, you understand that in the characters’ world, it’s weird to them to be among all these lowlifes and foreigners, but it is not inherently weird to them that they are aliens, or that they are space travelers. Or when Darth Vader attacks, we understand that it’s bad news, and an unexpected event, but that it’s not weird that he travels in a spaceship or wears a helmet. But in this movie, there’d be a big fanfare and we’d see a vista, and I’d have no idea whether Jim is thinking “Oh my god, it’s an amazing space station!” or if he’s just thinking, “shrug, space station.” And that’s really disorienting.

ADAM Did it bother you that his mother was wearing a kerchief, but on a space station?

BROOM The mom looked like she was sixteen!

BETH Yeah, “twelve years later” she hadn’t aged at all.

BROOM She looked like she was his girlfriend.

ADAM It was a little uncomfortable when they were dancing together.

BROOM The mom had no characterization at all. And in the opening scene when he’s a little kid, other than having a magical talking book, he and his mom are basically in a modern suburban bedroom. But then you find out that she actually runs the Admiral Benbow Inn, and their world is actually 18th-century old-timey. Plus robots. The whole idea of that kind of mix-and-match is from a strain of high-concept sci-fi fantasy writing that started to go in that direction — I don’t know when, the 70s and 80s maybe — but it shows up here without the kind of intellectual excitement that needs to motivate it. Steampunk was supposed to be this, like, stimulating mashup, but this just seemed like… a bizarre mix of things.

ADAM I was using the idea of steampunk as a way to get through the movie, and it made me feel better about it. Because then I didn’t have to wonder things like “why are they steering with a big wheel?”

BROOM It wasn’t really that I had a lot of explicit questions. I just felt ungrounded. And, to be honest, by the second half the movie I was having an easier time with it.

ADAM Partly because it isn’t plotted like a traditional Disney movie, many of the hiccuppy Disney things we dislike weren’t in this one. I mean, I guess there was a sort of an “I wanna know!” musical moment at the beginning, but not really.

BROOM But ultimately this wasn’t the same as the story of Treasure Island. And they abused the Long John Silver relationship.

ADAM It was exactly the same!

BROOM In Treasure Island, Jim develops a sort of false father-relationship with Long John Silver— in a much more subtle way, not during a falling-in-love montage, which is basically what we had here — and then his trust is betrayed. And Long John Silver continues to manipulate the relationship even as there’s something authentic about it, and this is a troubling source of poignancy. It’s not just, like, “is he a good guy or a bad guy?” He’s a mixed character, and Jim has to learn his independence from him. Rather than getting to a place where he’s sniffling “Awright, y’old pirate, I got somethin’ in my eye, goobye!” at the end.

ADAM I understand. The book’s Long John Silver isn’t a good guy, whereas this Long John Silver is a good guy.

BROOM Well, he wasn’t a good guy either, even though they ended with this sentimental parting and then his face in a magic cloud. He didn’t actually do anything that made him more of a good guy.

ADAM Yes he did! He let the treasure go to save Jim’s life!

BROOM All right. But he also threatened to kill Jim several times before that.

ADAM Before that! That’s because he too had some growing to do. Of course this is not as morally complex as a novel.

BROOM It was totally unbelievable that he would let the treasure go to save Jim’s life. (Also, it’s totally unbelievable that an entire planet is a machine full of space pirate treasure! Just kidding.) But really, when Long John Silver makes this momentous choice to give up all the treasure and save Jim instead, his line is just something like, “Ohhhhh fine I’ll do it!” And then seconds later the movie itself is making fun of it, when he says “It’s just a lifelong obsession; I’ll get over it.” That’s the writers doing a lazy thing that’s very popular these days, where a script says outright, “We know the story logic doesn’t really work! Ha ha ha ha! Sarcasm!” The Simpsons does this all the time. But the point on The Simpsons is “you can’t take this seriously!” A Disney movie shouldn’t do that. And it did it several more times, too. “Oh, of course this doesn’t make sense, but this is funny patter and it’s clever and sly of us to acknowledge it!” But it really didn’t make sense.

ADAM Well, obviously, it’s not as good as the novel. But I thought the very idea of having moral complexity in the villain at all 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. More than you can say for Uncle Scar.

BROOM Once I saw that the movie was going to go in that direction — they show us Jim losing his real father, and then gaining this new father figure — I thought, “wow, do they have the guts to actually go through with this? To go where the story goes?” Which is that Jim comes of age. He has to recognize that his father figure is flawed, and he has to choose to be without a father, to be independent. And that is not what happened in this movie.

ADAM Well, that would be more of a downer. I mean, come on.

BETH But he shows that he’s independent when he…

BROOM Surfs.

BETH Exactly. When he surfs to save the ship.

BROOM Well, at least it was better than Atlantis.

ADAM I liked that this was a Disney movie where the father was gone and not the mother, for a change.

BROOM The mother was more or less gone. That character was nothing. Those opening scenes were the worst, because I wanted to get my bearings, and they were just giving me this mother who was like a half-baked non-character from a nineties sitcom. She didn’t have anything at all to do with the milieu.

ADAM She was a little like the Malcolm in the Middle mother.

BROOM No, that character was sort of crazed and funny. This mother was, like, Courteney Cox. “Hi, I’m some lady. I guess I’m playing some lady!” She was nothing.

BETH She didn’t have a lot to work with.

BROOM I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt did maybe too conscientious a job trying to “act” the “part.” But it’s strange to hear someone trying to find the truth in stuff like “by the solar flares of Arcturus, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” All these stupid lines.

ADAM I think the guy who did Long John Silver was very good.

BROOM Yeah, he did a pretty good job.

ADAM This was exactly how I think of Long John Silver. Is that because I’ve seen some other depiction of Treasure Island where he’s just like this?

BROOM Well, the most famous one is the Disney one from the fifties, which is supposed to be good. I haven’t seen that since elementary school. I’d watch that again.

ADAM I thought it was good that Scroop was scary, and a real villain, but that there was just a little of him, not too much.

BROOM There was a character like that in the book, right?

ADAM Yes. They fight in the rigging and he falls into the water and dies. It’s all exactly like this. That’s partly why I liked the movie, because I just read Treasure Island and every time something happened, I would think, “Oh! Now he’s in the apple barrel!”

BROOM Except of course here it was a space-ple barrel. And as with everything in this movie, a space apple means some kind of gross squirting equivalent to an apple. Everything in the movie had been altered to look more like an avocado.

ADAM But nonetheless, it was satisfying that it was tracking so closely to this book that I very much enjoyed.

BROOM I’m glad you enjoyed the book. I agree that’s a good time.

BETH It’s a very good book.

ADAM The movie did have some frustrating “It’s the nineties, mom!” sort of intrusions. But not that many, and they seemed to feel embarrassed about them. They put most of them in the mouth of the nerdy scholar character.

BROOM I hated him. He didn’t contribute anything.

BETH And then there was that robot, too.

ADAM Ben Gunn?

BROOM I thought Ben Gunn was better than David Hyde Pierce’s character. And why was Emma Thompson in this at all? Why did there have to be a half-baked love story?

ADAM Why not?

BROOM “We have a strong woman character! oh she got injured, she’s going to lie down now.”

ADAM That’s what happens in the book!

BROOM The character’s not a woman in the book. And she had to have these weird fetish stockings. And her weird cat-face wasn’t…

BETH Attractive.

BROOM … or comforting or anything. She looked alien.

ADAM She was an alien!

BROOM The aliens looked alien in a way that didn’t make me feel at home.

ADAM You didn’t look at Mr. Arrow and think, “now there’s a stand-up guy”?

BROOM The rock-face guy?

ADAM The rhinoceros, yeah.

BROOM He was a rhinoceros? I thought he was a rock monster.

ADAM I thought he was a rhinoceros.

BETH I thought he was more like a rock monster.

ADAM Like a rhinoceros made of rocks.

BROOM Okay, I’ll work with that.

ADAM Go back and look. You’ll see.

BROOM Here’s what I was thinking during the movie: “I don’t want to be having critical ‘Disney’s gone downhill’ thoughts. Those are adult thoughts that are irrelevant to the intended audience. So let me watch it the way I would have as a kid, which means opening myself to not caring, and not caring that I don’t care.” It also means opening yourself up to be disoriented. As an adult, I can generally work out the rationales behind things, but if I don’t do that and just watch it, will I be disoriented? And I was. And I figured that when I was a kid, I would have just accepted that disorientation. And that maybe it’s supposed to be part of the fun of fantasy that everything is so weird. But then I was like, “but I don’t like this feeling! I prefer to know what’s going on!”

ADAM I spent most of the time thinking things like “I wonder if they’re going to put him in the apple barrel!” I was disappointed that the complex chess of their face-off on the island didn’t come to pass. Or the part where he pretends to be a ghost and scares off the crew.

BROOM When the book gets to be military tactics about the siege of the fort, that’s less interesting to me, and I appreciated them cutting that out. But you apparently like that part.

ADAM I didn’t dislike that part. You don’t like the way he sneaks on to the boat and pilots it to the north cove?

BROOM No, watching him sneaking around the island is good. But it does feel like a cheat to me — I think I wrote this on my site years ago — that in this book for kids about buried treasure, when they get to X marks the spot, it’s not actually there anymore and you’re denied the scene you’ve been looking forward to, where they’d dig up the hidden chest and open it and see a lot of sparkling gold. Ben Gunn already has it in his cave, right?

ADAM Yeah. But you get to go in the cave and see it there.

BROOM Yeah, but there’s not a proper Howard Carter reveal moment. Here they had a moment like that, but it was pretty ridiculous.

ADAM That the treasure of a thousand worlds is mostly rings. Aliens don’t even have fingers!

BROOM What’s really ridiculous is that the booby trap destroys everything! It doesn’t just kill the intruders, which would have made sense, but destroys the entire treasure. “Someone tried to get in and steal it? Well then, the time has come for all of it to be destroyed!”

ADAM But that’s just because it turned into Indiana Jones at the end.

BETH Exactly. It was just like that.

BROOM But even in Indiana Jones, the traps are there to kill the people.

BETH And the treasure. Everything is destroyed.

ADAM That’s just what it was. They were like, “we’re bored by Treasure Island so we’re going to switch to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”

BROOM But hold on. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there are traps to prevent people from getting to the treasure. And then at the end, there’s a restriction on the Holy Grail that you can’t take it out, and when they try to take it out, it triggers the entire structure to collapse on them rather than the Holy Grail leave the temple. That’s not the same thing as…

ADAM They also did the “I can’t save them both!” moment of reaching.

BROOM Yes. That was stolen directly. It was also stupid that with all of this incredible sci-fi magic going on, their presence is triggered by them walking through an ankle-height museum security red laser.

BETH It’s the nineties!

ADAM They needed to show it somehow. What other way can you think of to economically signal “booby trap”? It’s like Mission Impossible, where Tom Cruise is dangling from the ceiling with the beams around him.

BROOM Or the classic Entrapment with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. They could have just shown it like in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he thinks he’s outwitted the hidden mechanism, but then you see it shift and start up.

BETH But that takes too long.

BROOM You’re defending it? You just don’t like my tone. You want me to stop complaining.

BETH I just don’t have a problem with their stupid laser.

ADAM Broom, this is as good as it’s gonna get for a while!

BROOM I know.

ADAM I don’t have anything gay to say about this.

BROOM Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

ADAM He’s not gay.

BROOM He’s not?

ADAM No.

BROOM Let’s look this up.

ADAM I’m sure there will be unscrupulous gossip. I’m sure the first search after his name will be “Joseph Gordon-Levitt GAY.”

BROOM And you know that he’s not?

BETH I’ve looked him up. I don’t think he is.

ADAM I’m pretty well-informed about these sorts of things.

[He is looked up. He is probably not gay]

BROOM I’ve talked before about kids’ movies in the 80s having nobody at the wheel, how they got really harsh and brutal and dirty. Feeling a little disoriented this time made me think, “Maybe that was actually just the time in my life when I was open and vulnerable enough to be affected by such things. Maybe if I let myself be affected by it now it’s still there.” Or maybe I was overplaying the sense that it was creepy to try to get that feeling back. But it was genuinely a strain for me to feel at home with this, and I don’t think it’s just because everyone was a snail. I think it’s also because there’s less warmth than I want. There’s just less warmth in most 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.

ADAM Everything they put it in it that was not in the original made it worse.

BROOM Going back to what it’s like to watch movies as a kid: a kid has such a strong intuitive sense of who are the nice people, and where love is potentially going to come from; might it come from these people? And that’s why people love The Wizard of Oz, because when she says “I’m gonna miss you most of all,” you as a kid think, “yeah, because he’s nice! He’s a nice guy, that scarecrow!” In this movie, and most of these recent Disney movies, there’s no-one in it that I as a kid would have trusted. And I don’t think it has to be that way.

ADAM I think I would have thought the mom was nice, and that Jim was nice but cool, and that Long John Silver was nice ultimately. And I would have been relieved that Long John Silver turned out to be nice. And I would have known that the captain was nice but stern. And that the professor was nice but ineffectual.

BETH They’re all nice, but the underlying emotion is not there. You know these characters are supposed to be nice, but you don’t feel it.

BROOM And that distinction is something that kids definitely have access to. I remember being able to distinguish between movies that were obviously supposed to be one thing but kind of felt like something else, and the movies that actually felt the way they were supposed to. Like The Secret of Nimh, or The Last Unicorn… there were these animated movies that were a little bit less inviting than it seemed like they believed they were. And it was like that scary aspect to them was in part the sense that, like, no-one’s going to give you a hug, here. Even when they hug each other, they wouldn’t give you a hug. I don’t quite know how to put it. But that’s what I started to feel when I asked myself what this movie felt like.

ADAM “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

BROOM Yeah, butter wouldn’t melt in this studio’s mouth. Like a bad babysitter. Someone who doesn’t really know how to babysit who comes over and is like [gratingly] “all right, so what do you kids do?” That’s the feeling I get off the recent Disney movies.

ADAM Let’s read the review.

BETH I think the New York Times will basically like it.

ADAM I think they will appreciate the historicity.

BROOM They sometimes show up and say the cranky stuff that I say, like, “Look how Disney has fallen in this era.”

[We read it. It is very negative.]

ADAM Oof.

BROOM I think he’s right.

ADAM We’re grading on a curve.

BROOM A problem I’ve been thinking about a lot, in my life, is how to hold to one’s own opinions and standards in the face of a context that seems to imply a different set of standards. And that’s how we’re reacting to these movies. “Okay, so this is what this movie was; how good was it at being that?” And I think it’s a useful to me when there’s a review like this that holds its ground and says “That, the thing itself, sucks! The ‘bad parts’ are not the only thing that was bad about this.” I feel like, “Right! That’s what I need to learn to do all the time.” So, then, you might well ask, why are we watching all the Disney movies? Seeing as we’re well below sea level at this point? Uh… Well, I thought Lilo and Stitch was pretty entertaining and pretty sweet, and I didn’t have a problem with that.

ADAM It certainly seemed more sincere than this. But this was better than that review. He only wrote it that way because he hasn’t yet seen…

BROOM The next one.

BETH I don’t know how to watch them if I have to think of my actual response.

ADAM Yeah, if she had to engage with it sincerely, she’d be like, “What are we doing??”

BROOM Yeah, I don’t think you’ve said enough, Beth. Say more before we end this.

BETH I don’t know how to watch Disney movies if I’m supposed to actually think about them for real.

BROOM You’re allowed to be really angry and disgusted if that’s where it takes you.

BETH I don’t know. I would fall asleep in order to avoid watching that movie, if I was watching it for real. I considered it, while watching. I was thinking, “I feel kinda tired; maybe I’ll just fall asleep.” But then I thought, “No! I need to do this. I want to be present for this.” And then I made it be okay! I changed whatever I was seeing into something that was okay.

ADAM She made her own context!

BROOM But that’s scary. Does that not scare you?

BETH It didn’t feel scary to be doing it.

BROOM So basically, I create this context, by being a weird OCD taskmaster who creates a context where you must stay awake during this movie and then you must talk about it as though it were a movie worth talking about. And so you construct whatever brain you need to make that happen, instead of going to sleep, which is your actual critical take on the movie.

BETH Essentially.

ADAM Oh man! I gotta go.

 

[he goes to get his things]

BETH So… I’m serious. I don’t even know how to respond to this with my real brain. I don’t have any criticism of it because I made it be okay, so I could watch it. And now I just accept it. I just accept what it was.

BROOM Right. So my question is — and this is hard for me too — if your real brain would go to sleep, do you have an option in between? Something like, “I’m not going to stop paying attention, but I’m allowed to get angrier and angrier about how my time is being wasted”?

BETH I probably do. There is probably some kind of middle ground. I’m just not sure how to access anything other than, like, what I really feel, which is “I don’t want to watch this! I really don’t think this is good!”

BROOM But you’re on board with this project as being kind of fun in theory.

BETH Yes, yes, yes! I am.

BROOM So how does that part of you relate to the part of you whose real response is “I don’t want to watch this”? Can it not say, “I’m going to be righteously pissed off at Disney at the end of this”? Because the choice to go to sleep is itself a kind of “making it okay,” by zoning out. Are you afraid to be angry?

BETH No. I don’t know.

BROOM Are you afraid to be a mean critic of an innocent little puppy like a Disney movie? Because it’s not an innocent little puppy!

[Adam goes]

BROOM I’m going to transcribe at least everything up to this point. His discomfort with this part of the conversation is part of the conversation.

BETH I was trying to watch it openly, like a kid. Because that’s something we’ve been talking about, and, like you were saying earlier about music, if you open yourself to things, you can pretty much like anything. You don’t need to be critical about things, you can just accept them. And so I felt like that’s where I got with this. I just accepted everything about it. So it started, and I thought, “Oh my god, this is really lame. This is really lame.” And then I just switched into a mode where I thought, “Just let it wash over you; just let it be what it is.” But from there I’m not thinking critically. I’m not thinking like a film student. I’m not thinking analytically about it. I’m just watching it.

BROOM All of the things I have to say afterward, it always takes me a little time to let them precipitate into words. And that’s because, like I said, I’m trying to do that too. And this time, the genuine experience I was having was that I felt a little funny about it. Which is a totally legitimate response. The innocent, open part that a kid does is to watch something and at the end feel like, “I felt weird while I was watching that,” or “I didn’t feel anything while I was watching that.” And analytical criticism is just to then say, “Well, I want more than that from movies. Why didn’t that work? Let me try to figure out what just what on.” That’s what my family always used to do. We wouldn’t go to the movies with a plan like “and then we’re going to talk about it!!” We just went to the movies. But then afterward, the processing would always begin, where we’d all want to talk about what that thing was that just happened to us, which had been completely unspoken at the time.

BETH But you know, I feel a little bit numb, like nothing happened to me. And it’s because I put myself into a place where I wasn’t going to actually experience it, I was just going to “take it in,” sort of removed.

BROOM Maybe there’s different categories of these things. Because “just taking it in” feels very natural and complete to me. But your feeling like you didn’t actually experience anything because you “just took it in” means something must have been blocked out. I was trying to “just take it in” in the sense of quieting my tendencies to analyze until afterward. But in the process I was experiencing things that made me feel mildly weird.

BETH I just wasn’t feeling anything. I don’t know.

BROOM Like watching a McDonald’s commercial.

BETH I guess.

BROOM That was another thought I had. When I was a kid, there was just crap on TV all the time, which I would just watch as itself. I wouldn’t constantly think “Is culture good? Is this a good commercial?”

BETH I feel like this is something I would see at my cousin’s house, at someone else’s house. At times like that I would think, “Okay, this is what’s going to be happening for the next hour and a half; I’m just going to roll with it.” And that’s what this felt like. I kept looking at the clock. Which I always do when I’m watching one of these.

BROOM I remember in high school once being at someone’s house with people who were being nostalgic for their earlier youth, as happens in high school, and they had the laserdisc of The Chipmunk Adventure — the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie — and the girl whose house it was was saying “Oh my god! This music!” And they watched the whole movie — “they” included me — which was a movie of no nostalgic significance to me and of no artistic significance to anyone. And it was just a case of “Well, now I have to sit and wait until this is over.” And that thought was not me having a higher critical standard, it’s just what the movie was. And yes, that is what this movie was too! And so the challenge here is that now we want to try to put that into words. So if that’s what you have to say, go for it.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM That it was a nothing wasn’t surprising to me, though it was a little surprising that it was sort of weird and gross.

BETH That you thought it was weird and gross is surprising to me, because I didn’t have any thought like that, once. I didn’t think “this is weird” even once. I just thought “This is it. This is what I’m watching.” So then I feel like, “What did I do to myself to make it impossible to feel this?”

BROOM Maybe you’re just not as oversensitive as I am to weirdnesses like that. I have always been very ready to feel, like, “uh-oh, that texture is weird, it makes me vaguely uneasy!” I don’t think that’s necessarily universal.

BETH I don’t know.

BROOM I remember when I was a kid and He-Man would be on, I would think “I don’t understand how anybody could like this; this is not my show,” and occasionally I would also think, “It’s so weird and boring and foreign that its foreignness is a little creepy.”

BETH I felt that way about He-Man too. It was so dark — visually dark — that there was a sense of darkness in the cartoon.

[we go on at length about what was uninviting about He-Man]

BROOM And there was something in either just the aesthetic experience of contemplating that, or else in the attempt to get there, the experience of trying to be the kind of person it was for, or trying to understand who it was for and getting lost. “Where and what is this for?” This is, yes, what you would see at someone else’s house. This matches someone else’s world. This is someone else’s horizon. And that would make me a little uncomfortable.

BETH Yeah, I experienced that kind of thing all the time, as a kid. And I know that probably, if I were a kid, this would also give me that feeling, but I didn’t feel anything.

BROOM Was there anything in this movie that when you were a kid would have struck your fancy, even through a veil of total disinterest? Anything, like, “hey, that ball looks like it’d be fun to hold,” or something like that?

BETH Well, I think I probably would have thought Morph was cute. I think that would be it.

BROOM Morph to me sums up what was creepy about this movie. Because some of it was cute, but then again… He was like a blop of spilled Pepto-Bismol, and, like, they hugged him. He had no motivation. He was capable of absolutely anything. He wasn’t really on the side of good or bad. He was scary in the way that worms are scary to me, because, like, “they can move…but what are they??” And yet sometimes he was cute. And that’s a weird razor’s edge to be playing on.

BETH Yeah. It was unusual. You’re right, it was a weird movie. It was weird that they did that to the story. Most of the characters were unlikable. Even the main character wasn’t really likable.

BROOM He was a troubled kid, and you hoped one day he’d be untroubled. And then they say, “yeah, he’s at military school now and everything’s great,” but you didn’t get to actually feel like “I like him now!”

BETH He really just looked like my brother at seventeen, with his parted hair and dour, overly-sensitive demeanor.

BROOM But your father didn’t walk out on your brother. It’s God that walked out on your brother. He went off to sail the seas of space and never returned.

BETH Are you recording this?

BROOM I am. I may not transcribe all of it. But I may. You never know. I may transcribe it in a smaller font after Adam goes.

BETH I’m done.