BETH Okay, I will start.

BROOM Yeah, you’re the one who’s never seen it before.

ADAM And who had no idea at all, when this started, what it was about.

BETH I had no idea. I thought it was so unusual for Disney to have a movie that looked and was like this. The script was so strange. The script was great and it had nothing to do with anything Disney had ever done before.

BROOM It had to do with The Ugly Duckling.

BETH Okay. I guess I’m just thinking superficially.

ADAM It was so sad! I teared up multiple times.

BROOM It was really sad.

ADAM Her parents died in a car accident! There was a lot of social realism that we’ve never seen before and will never see again. This is like All Dogs Go to Heaven territory.

BROOM I’ve never seen that so I don’t know.

ADAM I’m kidding.

BETH It had more to do with the real world.

ADAM Yeah… except for the aliens.

BETH Of course it had aliens, but it had a social worker, it had Elvis… I mean, when have we ever acknowledged outside culture in a Disney movie? Never.

BROOM Is that true?

ADAM Well… What was that short? Set in old New York?

BROOM Alice Bluebonnet?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM But has there ever been a pop-culture reference like this? There were those weird Beatles vultures in The Jungle Book, but that was more like an inside joke. I don’t know why we’re talking about this. Yes.

BETH There’s never been anything as overt as Elvis.

BROOM The tone and spirit of the script was completely different from the norm, but in being about real emotions in the way that it was – which I think is so great – it was tied into the original Disney tradition. Essentially, this is the movie that I’ve wanted them to make, for the last thirty years of movies. And they only did it once. I don’t know why.

BETH Well, no, I think we can find examples.

BROOM But there’s a kind of…

ADAM … realism. And it’s really effective. But it’s effective in part because it’s paired with the surrealism of the aliens. It would be actually really depressing to watch a movie about a little girl whose family is rent apart by uncaring social workers. But the fact that there are aliens in it saves it from being too depressing.

BETH It felt like it was more the story of one person than of a team. All of the 90s movies felt like a bunch of people working on a concept together, and this felt like a very personal story that they managed to tell very well, I thought.

ADAM The Descendants, but with aliens.

BROOM Yeah, a little bit.

BETH It kinda was, kinda.

BROOM I mean, it was like E.T. but with Hawaii. And where the alien is the one learning things, instead of the kid.

ADAM It was really funny, though, in consequence. I thought all the jokes were really affecting. The interaction between the sisters was satisfyingly real but funny, in the way that the interaction between the family members in The Emperor’s New Groove was just alluding to. Remember we talked about how they had that jokey interaction?

BROOM I’m not going to knock The Emperor’s New Groove for not having been this; the tone there was different. But yes, this was – it’s just so obvious, watching it, that the feeling behind it is in good faith, and is not some kind of concocted simulacrum according to a formula like every other Disney movie’s sentiment in so long.

ADAM I thought it was great. I thought it looked really pretty but without being over-the-top beeeautiful.

BROOM It is beautiful. The backgrounds are all watercolor; I remember them being proud of that at the time, as they should be. And it’s a reference to their Ugly Duckling short – not part of our series – but when they look in that picture book, it looks like the 1939 Ugly Duckling Silly Symphony, and the backgrounds are all in that style. They haven’t used backgrounds like that since the 30s, and it gives it such a lush, human feeling.

BETH Also, the way the bodies were drawn was completely different from how they’d been treating women up until now.

BROOM Loving but not fetishized.

ADAM Huge legs.

BETH Yeah, but I feel like they were going for something realistic: very strong legs, unbalanced features, not completely proportionate.

BROOM There was a real spirit in all the designs. I thought it was particularly interesting when they had that Pamela Anderson lifeguard, and it was like they were saying “this is our version of a sexy body, within this worldview.” It wasn’t fetishistic. It was like the whole movie had a worldview, and nothing was going to break it.

ADAM I like that there’s all this Hawaiian dancing, and it seems like it’s going to be Disney orientalism, but actually they work at, like, a tourist resort. Which is satisfying, and felt legitimately what it would probably be like to live in the particular milieu of being working-class native Hawaiian.

BROOM Well, their house was pretty nice, until it got blown up.

BETH But it was small. I liked all the details of how the sister wasn’t keeping it together. I thought it was great.

BROOM I was feeling like it was one of the very very best – I may still feel that way – but I was thinking that this was a five-star masterpiece for the first two-thirds of the movie, and then once the house blew up, I felt like the denouement had a lot less conviction behind it.

ADAM It gets a little mawkish when he learns to speak English.

BROOM I think you get this effect in a lot of animated movies where they’re obligated to have the climax be climactic, and there’s a sense of exhaustion. I think they tend to leave that stuff until the end of the production, and it’s obligated to be hectic and to trump everything else, and it ends up feeling arbitrary. Here, so much attention had been lavished throughout on the little details, to allow the movie to be about little details, and then at the end it was like, “okay, we’re going to do some movie stuff so you know it’s an ending.” And I felt like the care dropped out of it a little. On the Little Mermaid commentary track, Alan Menken says it stresses him out to watch the end of the movie where the boat’s going around in the whirlpool, because he had to compose the cues in a crazy stressful rush.. and I think that’s going on in a lot of the final sequences of these movies. When the witch gets really big, turns into a dragon, whatever – those sequences often have a kind of grudging quality to them. And that’s what I felt here; some of the air came out at the end.

ADAM When the genie gets too big.

BROOM Actually, that’s one of the very best of those types of endings, the ending of Aladdin. But here, when they were chasing each other around in the spaceships at the end, it felt like “let’s just wrap this up, please.” But up until there it was on a much higher level.

ADAM I liked the personalities of Stitch’s alien pursuers.

BROOM I love that one of them is an obvious Dr. Seuss reference.

ADAM The skinny one?

BROOM Yeah, the little one, with the epaulettes for no reason and the little Dr. Seuss Adam’s apple.

ADAM But the big one seemed like a Rocky and Bullwinkle reference. He seemed like Boris and Natasha.

BROOM The Russian accent.

ADAM I like that the aliens all look like animals, and that they’re all horrified when they see Stitch revealed for the first time.

BROOM The whole setup is really good, and I was especially enjoying thinking of Beth watching it and having no idea where this movie was going or what the attitude of the movie was, as it was revealing itself.

BETH Yes.

BROOM And yes, as we said right before starting this recording, they really paid to get real Elvis songs.

BETH That had to be incredibly expensive.

BROOM It was built into the movie.

ADAM As a kid I loved the effect where you had animation but then you had a real photograph in it, which was an effect you got in both Tiny Toons and in Bloom County.

BROOM I don’t think it’s been done in one of these before, has it?

BETH It has not.

ADAM I loved it in both of those places and I was childishly tickled to see it here. Both when he watches the cartoon, and the photo of Elvis.

BROOM He in fact watches a non- cartoon. He watches the only thing that is not a cartoon.

ADAM Yes, he watches a disaster movie. Which is very much like a Tiny Toons joke. And maybe was an homage to that. So, thank you.

BROOM Just you wait for Chicken Little. So the character designs are thoughtful and interesting and satisfying, but the animation itself is some of the most fluid, loving animation we’ve seen in a long time. Especially coming after Atlantis.

BETH It seemed like an entirely different staff worked on this movie than worked on the past five. I mean, I liked The Emperor’s New Groove.

BROOM You know I think The Emperor’s New Groove is great.

ADAM But this is different.

BROOM This has real heart. This is something good for kids. Not that Emperor’s New Groove isn’t.

BETH But this is one that I feel like, “oh, I would want kids to watch this!”

BROOM I think the message is a really good one.

ADAM That’s why I say it all the time!

BROOM In fact, by being more specific than something like Bambi that just has very general ideas about family, it makes itself valuable. Here they’re saying, your family is a place where you understand each other, even though in the outside world…

ADAM I teared up when she said that she knew his parents must be dead because that’s why he breaks things. Aw.

BROOM And then that they made it his story. They’re struggling because they have a small family, but he’s struggling because he’s existentially abstract.

BETH He has no roots.

BROOM Which reminded me a little bit of this movie’s contemporary, A.I.

BETH Which I have not seen.

BROOM It’s very dark and it’s nothing like this. But that they made Stitch be the protagonist, even though he can’t be the protagonist by any normal rules. Because he’s a joke character.

ADAM I like that this is a movie set in Hawaii but the protagonist is not a clownfish.

BROOM What other movie is set in Hawaii, besides The Descendants?

ADAM Uh, probably Blue Hawaii with Elvis.

BROOM Now, is it accurate that everyone on Hawaii would just be able to surf? That doesn’t seem likely.

BETH No, they really do.

BROOM Even this ordinary teen girl would be able to surf like that?

BETH I think it’s common, yes.

ADAM Barack Obama can surf.

BROOM Can he?

ADAM I believe he can.

BROOM Did anyone else think about the birth certificate when they showed the official State of Hawaii document?

BETH No.

ADAM Which played such a crucial role in the movie.

BROOM Right.

ADAM The movie is great.

BETH It is. I don’t understand why your sister thinks it’s boring.

BROOM She doesn’t remember it. I think she might have been thinking of something else.

ADAM I actually did not remember any of the first twenty minutes, in space. I didn’t remember that that happened.

BROOM I did. I remember being sort of tickled by how unusual the movie was, at the time, but I don’t think I was as moved or as grateful as I was now. Maybe I just wasn’t as invested in what was going to happen to Disney. Or maybe I just didn’t realize that Disney was about to really lose it, yet again, so it didn’t seem so significant. But now it seems significant. I don’t know how they squeezed this one out; I don’t know how the guy whose idea this was – based on an idea by, and then he was a co-director – got this to happen. I don’t know how this movie happened, but it’s cool that it did.

BETH I’m glad it did, too. What year is this?

BROOM 2002.

ADAM All I really remembered about it was “Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind.”

BROOM You’ve said it like four times in the course of the project, and it always seemed funny to me that you remembered it at all, because I didn’t remember that. But I do now.

ADAM And I remembered the hunky boyfriend and his fire-dancing routine. He was sort of a himbo, in a way that was endearing.

BETH He had fancy hair.

ADAM “She likes your butt and your fancy hair.”

[we read the review]

ADAM How strange that I made a Ving Rhames joke right before we started watching this.

BROOM Did you not know he was actually in it?

ADAM No.

BROOM What did you say?

ADAM I said it starred Ving Rhames and Anne Hathaway.

BROOM Right before I restarted the recording, you said that that was a weirdly earnest review, but I think it was an earnest movie, in its private way.

ADAM There just weren’t a lot of pyrotechnics in the wording of that review.

BROOM I think A.O. Scott’s gotten bolder in recent years. His mean reviews now have some fire to them. Anyway, I think we agree that the review was right on.

ADAM I’d totally let my children watch it. It seems totally post-9/11.

BROOM Does it? What does that mean to you?

ADAM It has an emotional earnestness.

BETH But don’t you think they were developing it prior to 9/11?

ADAM Yeah, I know, I’m being silly.

BETH No, I like that we bring it up every time.

BROOM Well, this is the one to say it about.

ADAM If you had to guess which came before, and which came after: this, and The Emperor’s New Groove…

BROOM Guys, let’s not forget Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

BETH Atlantis was nothing.

BROOM Now, Adam, it’s been a couple weeks since we saw Atlantis. Do you still feel that we were too hard on it?

ADAM Yeah. I just remember it being exciting.

BROOM All right. I was just curious.

ADAM All I can remember is the exciting visuals.

BROOM This one was like a feast for the eyes.

ADAM This was better. Of course this was better.

BETH So much better.

ADAM This was probably the best one after the classic ten. It’s the best non-classic one.

BETH I agree.

BROOM Honestly, while I was watching this, I was thinking…

BETH You think it might be “a classic”?

BROOM No, I think maybe I like it better than, like, Beauty and the Beast.

BETH So what are our top ten?

BROOM Thus far? Because let’s save some room for Brother Bear!

[We then proceed to try to make a list of ten, but after some consideration, I am omitting this section of the conversation because I deem it to have been premature (see below) and, more importantly, under-prepared. Our fuzzy memories of our own opinions diverge, arbitrarily and sometimes drastically, from our actual opinions as documented on this site. We will return to this exercise as a future date.]

BROOM I like how we’re doing a post-mortem because we feel like the true story is over and all that’s left is to claw our way through the rubble.

BETH Who knows, maybe Bolt will belong on there.

ADAM I’m actually really excited for Frozen.

BROOM How do you feel about Drop Dead Fred, or whatever? Wreck-It Ralph?

ADAM The title didn’t seem promising, but the previews and the posters that I saw looked pretty good.

BROOM I’m worried that it’s going to be too tied to actual video game characters and will feel commercial in a way that will grate.

ADAM I think it’s gonna be a lot like Toy Story.

BROOM Maybe, but Toy Story was… well, Mr. Potato Head was a real toy.

ADAM And Barbie. And the little green army men.

BROOM You’re right. But those things are all each several decades older than Mario. Just the idea of Mario showing up in this movie kind of creeps me out.

ADAM He’s probably too expensive.

BROOM Oh, no, he’s gonna be in there.

ADAM He is?

BROOM I’m pretty sure they’ve got Nintendo characters in there. It’s good business for everyone. Who doesn’t want to be in a Disney movie?

ADAM I’m just saying I think Frozen will be good. And I think that The King of the Elves will be good.

BROOM I don’t know enough about what those are.

ADAM I read the synopsis on Wikipedia of the story on which it’s based.

BROOM Well I am not un-looking forward to Treasure Planet. It could be fun.

ADAM Well. It’s a lot more ambitious than The Fox and the Hound, that’s for sure.

BETH I kept thinking about Ocean’s Eleven, because it featured a ragtag team of quirky experts, as this tried to do, and made ninety minutes so much tighter and more enjoyable.

ADAM You’re saying the quirky crew of characters made this more enjoyable?

BETH No no no no no. Ocean’s Eleven has, like this movie, a ragtag team of experts that aids in an adventure. And it’s a short, fast movie in which you get to know each of those characters and like them and root for them. And there’s also a lot of action. I think this movie wanted to do exactly that and completely failed. I thought it was incredibly obtuse.

ADAM What are you talking about? Audrey was the tough Hispanic heroine who had a chip on her shoulder but secretly, you know, a conscience.

BROOM This movie managed to have not a single thing in it that I found interesting.

ADAM Now come on, that’s not fair. It was riotously full of incident and full of invention, for a ninety-minute-long Disney movie.

BROOM What I mean by “managed” is that despite being full of stuff and visually very accomplished, there was not a single thing that genuinely caught my interest. It was all old and it was all done without feeling or sense.

ADAM I thought some of Vinny’s dialogue was funny.

BROOM Yeah, Don Novello came out okay.

ADAM I also liked some of the scenes with the chain-smoking older woman who ran the switchboard.

BETH She was my favorite. You thought she was a cliche?

BROOM I think she was the same as the waitress from the previous movie. [ed.: No, different actresses.]

ADAM They tried not to make them cliches even though they were all stereotypes. If that makes sense. They were each doing a bit, but the bit was a little different from what you’ve seen before.

BROOM I really felt strongly that there was nothing here that the creators of this movie had come up with on their own.

ADAM Couldn’t that have been comfortingly familiar?

BETH No!

BROOM No, because it was a bullshit blend. It didn’t work. It would have been comfortingly familiar if they had aced it or done it with care. But like Beth said, somehow we didn’t actually care about this ragtag bunch. And I know why we didn’t care about them: because they were not introduced one by one, which is the way you do that, they were introduced in a scene where he arrayed a bunch of headshots and then named them very quickly. Then later, yes, they each had introduction scenes, but those scenes were grudging and forced.

ADAM This was a very short movie.

BROOM It was longer than the last one.

ADAM To put this much plot into.

BROOM I don’t know what the plot was.

BETH I don’t either.

ADAM The plot was… what was that movie?

BROOM Avatar?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH It was sort of like Avatar but it wasn’t nearly as good.

BROOM It had the girl from Avatar in it, and it had the waterfall from Avatar in it, but it did not have a plot.

ADAM It had the “everything we thought was right is wrong!” feel of Avatar.

BROOM Because they’re all mercenaries and then they have to be good guys at the end?

ADAM Except in Avatar he’s the only one who’s a good guy. And his mom. Or, not his mom, but…

BROOM Sigourney Weaver?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM She’s not his mom, but you got it more or less. You got to the psychological core, there.

ADAM Here, everyone is a good guy except for the two bad guys. I didn’t see coming that Rourke was a bad guy. He had a very mellifluous voice and charming character.

BETH Are you serious?

ADAM Yeah. What?

BROOM Well, if you didn’t see that coming, you probably had more fun with this movie than I did.

ADAM I did have some fun with this movie. I thought Kida’s mom was going to come back at the end, but she didn’t.

BETH I did too. I thought she was being stored in a netherworld and would be released. I cannot imagine what it’s like for a kid to watch this movie, because it was really hard to follow, I thought.

ADAM If this was your first introduction to the ragtag team of caperers movie, what an awesome movie this would be. You’d be like, “how’d they think of all that?”

BROOM I felt like this was tried-and-true crap being dished up again but not right.

ADAM But you’ve never seen this crap as a Disney movie before. I mean, look, would you rather have seen another [singing] “Somewhere out there…” … I know that’s not Disney…

BROOM I would like to have seen this movie, but good. Beth kept saying she thought she was going to love it; that was because she knew what all the elements were, and she thought they were going to be cool.

BETH I thought the tropes would provide. And they really let me down.

BROOM I entirely blame the writing and directing. It’s not because the concept didn’t work.

BETH It’s the script. I think it’s mostly the script’s fault.

ADAM Michael J. Fox did not help.

BROOM There was twice as much dialogue as there should have been, so everyone was talking really fast the whole time. It was directed really fast. There were no moments that were real; there was no time that you got to feel that you were really somewhere.

BETH Except in the camp. At night, when they were camping out, that was the one time that I felt briefly, like, “okay, I can do this, this is like a real moment here.” For two minutes. I was okay with that.

BROOM Even that scene, maybe I was just in a sour mood, but I felt like, “oh, sure, they each have to have a backstory.” And again it was handled like that array of faces: “okay, what’s your backstory? okay what’s your backstory? okay we love you all, good night.”

BETH Because the director didn’t know how to do it. Or the writers. Someone.

ADAM Um, everyone: Audrey was a tough-talking Hispanic mechanic.

BROOM She is the worst-animated character…

BETH …in any Disney movie we’ve seen.

ADAM She had a sarcastic catchphrase that became a touching catchphrase when she parted from him! Hel-lo?

BROOM “Two for flinching”?

BETH Her face was not consistent.

BROOM She had no expressions in her face. She didn’t look right. Whenever she was given emotion to convey, she couldn’t do it. I felt embarrassed for her lead animator the first time I saw it, and this time I felt confirmed. Yes. Horrible.

ADAM “Who told you that?” “A man by the name of Thaddeus Thatch.”

BROOM Why didn’t the grandfather…

ADAM Why didn’t he come back, like Frodo?

BROOM No, why didn’t Rourke reveal that he had killed the grandfather?

ADAM You think that happened?

BETH It would have added.

BROOM That’s a standard part of the shit they were doing!

ADAM I thought it was gonna be like when Frodo comes out of the shadows in Rivendell, and he’s been there the whole time.

BROOM Bilbo! Bilbo. Please.

ADAM That’s what I meant to say. Correct that in the transcript.

BROOM Yeah. I won’t subject you to the humiliation. [ed.: untrue]

ADAM Once I’ve seen the three-part movie of The Hobbit, I’ll remember.

BETH It just seems like the script was fixable and workable, and no one stepped up.

BROOM I have a tip for screenwriters: never have your screenplay revolve around a magic crystal. Never. That is the lowest He-Man choice. “What is the power source? What makes everything work?” It could have been anything they wanted. A magic crystal is so lame. And then the whole second act of the movie is about the magic crystal, and what is it going to do? It can do whatever it wants; it’s that magical. And what does it ultimately do? It makes robots clap their hands and make a shield.

BETH It made some cars go. Can we talk about the illustration style? It’s pretty different from everything else we’ve seen. You liked it, Broom, you thought it was good? You said “accomplished” before.

BROOM Well, I often talk about whether it seems like the animators cared about what they were doing. I thought this movie was horseshit and yet I also thought they did seem to care. They seemed excited about the way it looked and the stuff they were doing visually.

ADAM It had a lot of crescendo animations. The city was a little disappointing, but things like the columns, and the volcano, and even Washington D.C. in 1914, I thought, looked kind of cool.

BETH Yeah, but didn’t you think the characters looked a little Adult Swim-y? From the early 2000s?

BROOM I think they wanted to, I think they were going for “comic book edginess.” The Netflix envelope says something about it being a “rare foray into PG animation.” I’m not sure that corresponds so much to the content as it does to the attitude.

BETH Yeah, the attitude. The evil woman’s face had a very grown-up animation look.

ADAM Like, the Nazi? Helga?

BROOM But it doesn’t add up to anything. She just has a smirk. It’s just like a comic book, it’s like a terrible comic book.

BETH She had no nose. Her face was mostly white space with a very little squiggle for her nose, which is so not Disney. And I was impressed with that.

ADAM And all the blue glowing looked really blue. And glowing.

BROOM It was a showcase for the special effects team, and I thought it all looked good. But the guy turns into a crystal monster at the end, and then blows up? Come come!

BETH I thought it sucked. I was so disappointed. I really really thought I would like it based on the trailer.

ADAM I liked it better than you guys did, obviously.

BROOM If I were a kid and I didn’t know this stuff, as Adam just said, if this was my first time to it all, I think I would be able to have an experience that I’m not able to have with this movie. I would be able to imagine being under the earth, thinking about how crazy that would be. But some of it would also be genuinely scary. When she gets drawn into the crystal and it turns into her? That’s incredibly creepy, and it reminds me of the 80s, like I said about The Black Cauldron: this stuff just got into the water and became standard, and I’m not sure the effect on kids is healthy. The crystal person is creepy. And that the guy turns into a crystal because he gets a cut?

BETH That is creepy.

ADAM Why were the Atlanteans Polynesian? Was this supposed to be in the Pacific somewhere? Or was this just some weird misplaced Orientalism?

BETH I think it was that. They didn’t know what to do so they just made them look kind of exotic.

ADAM Just ooga-booga.

BROOM Something borrowed, something blue. The whole thing was just stuff. And the music was so over-the-top.

BETH And yet there were no songs, which was refreshing.

BROOM Thank god. That would have been unbearable. But they kept breaking the mood with the jokes, which were totally scattershot, had nothing in common with each other or with the mood of the story.

BETH Really inconsistent, yeah.

BROOM “Oh my god, this incredible portal is opening up!…” [vaudeville sting] “wah-wah-wah!” It had no agenda to be anything in particular to us.

BETH What are we supposed to feel at the end?

ADAM It’s supposed to feel like the end of Swiss Family Robinson, where they all go back to the world but he stays behind. It’s supposed to feel poignant, but at the same time so right. You didn’t want him to go back to the boiler!

BROOM He had nothing. His books are in storage.

ADAM His cat…

BROOM I don’t know what happened to the cat! I hope the cat was visible in that scene where the old man was by the fire, at the end.

BETH I don’t think it was.

BROOM Another missed opportunity!

ADAM The cat may have been killed in the shipwreck. [ed: confirmed that the cat is present at the fireside in the final scene]

BETH All right.

ADAM I mean, whatever, guys, whatever. Aren’t you at least glad they tried something different?

BETH Yes, I am.

BROOM I am, but this is still the kind of thing that depresses me, because it feels like the urge to create a movie is no longer quite based on having anything to say. It’s just “let’s do the routine,” and the routine is not even something they have any particular access to.

ADAM When we went to see the Madonna concert last week, I described it to Mike afterwards as being a “frantic pastiche,” which I’ll tell you about offline. But this had that element. There were at least ten movies that this reminded me of.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM Yes. And ten episodes of Duck Tales.

BETH The sad thing is, I thought this was terrible, and I think very much worse things are to come. Right? It’s gonna get worse.

ADAM I don’t know.

BROOM I can’t imagine feeling less connected to what’s going on than I did during this. I might feel that something is really wrong, though. Yes, there might be worse things.

ADAM Do you guys remember The Rescuers Down Under? Apparently not.

BETH But there was a charm…

BROOM It wasn’t very good. But it had that scene where the guy kept moving the eggs around and his lizard was trying to eat them. That was pretty good. You guys don’t remember nothin’.

BETH I don’t remember. Okay, I think we’re done.

ADAM All right. Yeah. Does anyone want to talk about what this has to do with September 11th?

BETH Obviously nothing. I thought we might be able to tie it in; we can’t.

BROOM We’re going to do the thing we always do.

BETH Read the review.

[we read it]

BROOM You felt vindicated by that? You thought it was as good as he thought it was?

ADAM Yeah. I am pleased to note that Vinny was played by the guy who plays Father Guido Sarducci. Of whose letters I had a book when I was a kid.

BROOM Well, he wrote that book of letters but it’s not in the character of Father Guido Sarducci. It’s as Lazlo Toth.

ADAM I know. Which I loved as a kid, by the way.

BROOM I didn’t discover those until late. It was too political for me as a little kid.

BETH Not for Adam.

ADAM No. Although it was all about Richard Nixon.

BROOM Although there was a sequel where he wrote to George Bush.

ADAM “Citizen Lazlo.” I had that also.

BETH So you liked it; that’s okay, that’s fine!

ADAM I mean, whatever, you won’t remember it, but… I don’t know, as I was watching it I was like, “well, that went down easy.”

BETH I agree with that. It went faster than I expected. Well, no. It didn’t go faster than I expected, but it went fast once I realized how much I thought it sucked.

BROOM Once you knew what to expect!

ADAM It was not in the top half, or even in the top two-thirds, but it was not in the bottom ten.

BROOM This was quite low for me, because I felt unable to root for it, because it was so content with what it was trying for and what it wasn’t going to try for at all.

ADAM Well, fine!

BETH How many have we seen?

BROOM This was forty-one.

BETH It might be in my bottom ten.

ADAM You guys will get all the character-driven homeliness you desire in the next one.

BROOM You think these characters were especially attractive?

ADAM I don’t mean physical homeliness, but the plot of the next one is a lot more “Dear Mr. Henshaw” and a lot less… I don’t know…

BROOM “Atlantis: The Lost Empire.”

ADAM I was gonna say it was like a “Looney Tunes,” but it’s actually like a “Tiny Toons.”

BETH It was strikingly unambitious in terms of what it wanted to be, but it was completely successful. I think of Disney movies as all trying to be greater than what this was. It was really silly, and the time went so much more quickly than it had for maybe the past ten. It was really entertaining the entire time.

ADAM As a kid, I would have been in stitches at the “Wait a minute, what you just said doesn’t make sense!” jokes. “Wait a minute, I’m going to spell out a convention here!”

BROOM I am in stitches.

BETH You were smiling the entire movie! Every time I looked at you you had a big smile on your face.

BROOM It makes me smile! And I liked it so much I would even take issue with the idea that this is unambitious. I think it’s ambitious in a totally different direction.

BETH But it will never be a classic. It can’t be a classic, because… it reminded me of watching a cartoon episode of Friends. The types of jokes are the types of jokes that — most of them are not the way people joke now. It was very of its time. And I think if September 11th hadn’t happened, this could have turned into something else. I think that this type of joking ended with September 11th.

ADAM The “Wait a minute, buster!”

BETH The sort of David Spade quality of everything, that the late nineties had. It just ended. There’s something else that took its place.

BROOM I feel like this movie is actually a really interesting landmark on the path of comedy; I don’t think it’s the end of a path, I think it’s transitional. You see David Spade being used as David Spade: “uh-bye-bye,” “no touchee,” and all of that, but there’s also stuff in there that I think is if anything ahead of its time, or at least very astute of them.

BETH There’s some stuff that is still in the landscape of comedy now, but…

BROOM I think there’s a goofball thing here that’s not a Friends thing and not a David Spade thing. I remember when I first saw this, the “I’ll turn him into a flea and then I’ll put that flea in a box and then I’ll put that box in another box and then I’ll mail it to myself…” bit —

BETH That was my favorite joke in the movie.

BROOM It was my favorite joke in the movie too. But watching it now, I feel like that joke looks forward to what the next ten years’ sense of comedy was going to be. And that some of the more Monty Python-style stuff — like where he sticks his head into frame and says “This is about me. Not him.” — the spelling it out, like you’re saying Adam, the meta- “we’re going to joke about the joke,” “Why do we even have that lever?” I think is a later kind of irony. In the nineties, they wouldn’t ordinarily have made the “why do we even have that lever” joke. Whereas now, ten years after this, it feels like, “yeah, we’ve really had that out by now.” I think this was at the point where David Spade and that were both happening. I don’t have a clear sense of how to define that, but I do think there’s another element in this movie.

ADAM When we were in college we had a fake TV show premise called “It’s the Nineties, Mom!”

BETH I’ve heard about “It’s the Nineties, Mom!”

ADAM Actually the humor and the style remind me eerily of “Monkey Island.”

BROOM This is funnier than “Monkey Island.”

ADAM “Monkey Island” has funny bits. Like the waitress in the movie, at the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. “Oh, we get that all the time, hon.” That’s like a “Monkey Island” joke.

BROOM “Bless you for coming out in public” I thought was pretty funny.

ADAM And the Bob’s Big Boy sign as rendered in, like, South American glyphs was like a “Monkey Island” joke, I thought.

BROOM I think that this needs to be seen as a significant accomplishment, if only because everything that it tries to be is something that so many movies have tried, and continue to try to be, and they rarely get even close to working. It’s usually incredibly tedious. When you asked if you were going to like it, Beth, and I said, “maybe, but I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I really thought that maybe, watching it now — I haven’t seen it in eight years or so — I would feel like it’s just grating, I’ve been Shrekked out and I can’t go back here, it’s not funny. But there’s something real fluid and natural and joyful about this movie that I am very impressed by. It’s exactly what Disney usually sucks at! There’s rarely a joke that I don’t cringe at in other Disney movies.

BETH Yeah, it’s edgier than almost any Disney product ever.

BROOM Because Hercules, it just wanted to be this. What else did it want to be but this, a movie that we thought was charming and silly the whole way through? But Hercules for us was like, “okay, we’re really trying to work with you, please please just don’t be too embarrassing.” This was never embarrassing to me.

ADAM Well…

BROOM Yeah, go ahead, tell us what was embarrassing to you.

ADAM This was the first time in a Disney movie where they had, like, a “no homo” joke. And they had multiple ones.

BROOM How do you feel about that?

ADAM Well, I don’t know. It’s sort of like fart jokes. I’m used to it, certainly.

BROOM You take fart jokes just as personally? Because I know I do. That’s why I don’t go to Chick-Fil-A.

ADAM It was basically the same joke as in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. You know, the “those aren’t pillows” joke. I mean, I don’t know — you didn’t wince at all at the hyper-knowingness? You don’t think that’s, like, a blind alley? You don’t feel like there was no… well, I was going to say there’s no emotional sentiment here, but I guess the kids and the mom were supposed to seem genuinely warm in a kooky way.

BROOM I think they had taken some care to make it clear that joking is a warm family thing in that setting. The joking is going to continue, but here it’s going to signify that this is a happy home. It seemed not meaningless, to me.

ADAM I liked that Yzma wore that cloche hat and that flapper-skeleton outfit.

BETH She was a good villain.

BROOM She was great.

ADAM It would have been lacking without her. Kronk is also a pretty funny character, for being the stupid sidekick.

BETH I liked that he was a foodie. Ten years ahead of his time.

BROOM That, again, is I think a joke that was… to come. The absurd specificity of the spinach puffs. And that he can talk to squirrels.

ADAM Didn’t you think it was ugly to look at?

BETH Yeah, but it didn’t bother me that much.

BROOM I didn’t, I thought it was pretty to look at. What didn’t you like?

BETH I thought some of the backgrounds were nice.

BROOM I thought the designs were all good.

BETH It felt Saturday-morning-esque, a little bit.

ADAM Yeah, it felt Hanna Barbera.

BROOM To me, the fluidity and the style of the animation was really top-notch.

BETH It’s true, the animation is good, but I feel like the character design had a sort of lumpier look.

ADAM It just didn’t look like anything Disney.

BETH It felt the least Disney of all of them. But that was a fine thing!

ADAM Well, they disagree with you, because they’re never doing this again.

BROOM They made an Emperor’s New Groove 2: Kronk’s New Groove, or whatever.

BETH What was the reception to this?

BROOM I think it was well-received because I think that was why I sought it out to watch it. I didn’t see it in the theater, I saw it on video. And for some reason I think I watched it, like, five times in one month in college. It seemed very familiar now, even though I haven’t seen it in many years. I just think it’s well designed and well executed.

BETH It’s a good script all-around. It’s really tight.

BROOM It’s just so rare that in these things the jokes are funny. I’m willing to say that this is a very special thing, because I can’t think of another cartoon I feel that way about.

BETH I had two or three full laughs.

BROOM And it’s funny in an animation-y way, which usually runs the risk of being, like, just animation nerds getting off on their little moments. But those moments were made to land, when they were the point. Like at the end when she’s a kitten and she’s being evil, and the person animating that kitten clearly enjoyed it, it actually gets a laugh because it’s actually fun to watch!

BETH It was self-aware in that nineties way, but… there’s nothing wrong with that.

BROOM It makes me happy to see that this has actually aged well. I don’t think you need to go into retro mode to understand this.

BETH Yet.

BROOM I don’t think it’s necessarily going to make it another ten years.

BETH Yeah, I think that soon it will feel dated, and we just happen to be —

BROOM But, you know, old fast-talk movies, The Philadelphia Story or whatever, they’re “dated,” and yet they explain to you how the comedy works by being so confident about how the comedy works. I could imagine this being a movie that becomes more and more, like, “they sure don’t make ’em like this anymore!” but while you’re watching it, it works. The Marx Brothers is both dated and not dated at all. For them to be going down a river and he says “We’re about to go over a big waterfall, aren’t we? Bring it on.” — I don’t think that’ll ever seem less relevant, because a scene where people go over a big waterfall is perennial. It’ll always be there. It’s not like we can snark our way out of the reference point even existing for future generations.

ADAM I don’t know. He has a sort of bro-y snarkiness that is very of its time. I hope.

BROOM But the whole point of the movie is that this is a terrible way to be. The moral of the movie is, “Do not be David Spade.”

BETH It is anti-David Spade.

BROOM Which is why it’s so bearable.

ADAM John Goodman was a little earnest for me. It was hard to take watching him save the llama so many times.

BETH I was fine with that.

BROOM They’re trying to balance these elements, like, David Spade has to be totally unlikable, but we have to like him, and, you know, the movie has to be a total joke, but it has to have a serious thing in it.

BETH Isn’t that David Spade’s thing? You hate him but you think it’s cute?

BROOM But on SNL when he would do the same thing, you know, “uh… Dan Rather… you’re an asshole… anal rape…” I would find it unwatchable because I didn’t sympathize with his perspective, and the context was not “this is an asshole talking.” But here it was introduced as “this is what a horrible person sounds like.” We can laugh at that. His attitude was the subject, not the point of sympathy. So I was going to say, it’s one of these balancing acts that people never pull off — and yes, maybe there was one too many rescues or one too many betrayals — but they basically pull it off!

BETH Yeah.

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM That came down a little heavier on the mindlessness than you are. But I liked it. Will you remember any of those jokes three days from now?

BETH I’ll remember the atmosphere.

BROOM I remember quite a bit of it.

BETH Because you watched it five times.

BROOM It’s just very inviting, to me. I find it delightful.

ADAM The joke of having characters in a non-Jewish setting playing Jews is also a very “Tiny Toons” joke.

BROOM You’ll have to tell me when that happened.

ADAM The waitress!

BROOM Saying “mazel tov”?

ADAM Yeah, and being like an old Jew. That would have struck me as hysterically funny, when I was ten.

BETH And that’s how “Tiny Toons” was?

ADAM It was exactly like this. They were like cute bunny rabbits, and they would always lapse into vaudeville jokes. Or sort of Billy Crystal stuff. I just thought that was super-funny when I was a kid. I’m sure if I had seen this when I was ten, I would have been transported.

BROOM There’s so much more to it than that! When it pulls back and back dramatically and then pulls back further to a bug on a branch, that’s my thing.

ADAM Yes, knowingness was really funny to me when I was a kid!

BROOM It can still be funny.

ADAM I’m just saying, it was particularly funny to me when I was ten. That’s all I got.

BETH I’m debating giving it four stars on Netflix, which is a big deal for me.

BROOM Congratulations.

BETH Thanks. When most things get twos, Disney-wise…

BROOM Yeah, I think this may be their best film of the past fifteen years. That’s how I feel.

ADAM Tangled is pretty good.

BROOM All right. I look forward to the ones I haven’t seen. Coming up next, however: Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

BETH It looks great to me from the preview.

BROOM Atlantis starts out and you feel like it might be comic book fun, but then it has to take its own story seriously, and you think, “this story doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. I no longer care about this.”

BETH Well, that’s the problem with most Disney, and that’s why this one succeeded. It did not take itself seriously.

BROOM Exactly.

BETH The end.

ADAM The end.

[we turn off the recording but then:]

ADAM We just noticed from looking at the Wikipedia entry that there is no love story in this movie. And that is very satisfying because it avoids a lot of stupid treacliness. Also no songs.

BETH I was going to say, the lack of songs was great.

BROOM There was the opening and closing number. Which is lively and pleasant. But it doesn’t happen during the story.

BETH It’s not a musical.

BROOM Right.

[we turn it off again but then:]

BROOM Say it again.

BETH This was a precursor to the “bro-mance,” about ten years ahead of its time.

BROOM Uh-huh. Except it was called the “buddy movie” prior to being called the “bro-mance.”

BETH But it felt like a “bro-mance” because it had the homophobic rescue kiss scene.

BROOM That’s true.

BETH The end again.

[this time it really is]

ADAM Wow. They sort of head-faked us into thinking this was gonna be another Jungle Book, but it was actually like The Poseidon Adventure.

BROOM I don’t know what it was. It was like The Road, some kind of post-apocalyptic movie. Except then it wasn’t.

BETH But for most of it, it was. For seventy-five percent of it, it was really dark.

ADAM You were surprisingly gripped.

BETH I was. By the time they were in the cave, I was responding to it. I was talking back.

ADAM I’m not so sure that this was a failure, the way it seemed like it was going to be at the beginning, when it was all that swoopy CGI and that Kevin Costner music.

BETH There was no character development early on — or I was not paying attention —

BROOM So you felt like the “character development” — and I’m going to put that in quotes when I type it up — that existed later in the movie was… meaningful?

BETH No. Well, I don’t know.

BROOM You guys understand that the backgrounds were real film, and the credits just now listed all the places they went to shoot them?

ADAM That was cool. There were like eight different places that they filmed it.

BETH I felt like it had to be live, because the water looked way too good.

ADAM There wasn’t character development, but there was strong characterization.

BETH Yes, but I felt like I didn’t really see it until the middle of the movie. Early on — maybe it’s just because I was so turned off by the beginning — no one seemed appealing to me or worth caring about.

BROOM Tell me more about what you were turned off by at the beginning, because I, like I said, was surprised by how early and with what conviction you guys were groaning. It seemed like all we’d seen was sort of —

BETH Incredibly slow —

BROOM — sweeping, beginning-of-a-movie scenery.

ADAM It was the hackneyed sort of establishing shots, and then it was that sort of Rube Goldberg routine with the egg, which was kind of a turn-off, and then the “Mom, can we keep it?” routine, which we’ve seen literally like four times. And I was just, like, “oh, god. This is just gonna be CGI, and they have not thought at all about the story. It’s just gonna be the worst bits of every Disney story just mashed together as an excuse for this rickety CGI.”

BROOM And somehow we think it wasn’t that? I don’t think the movie really changed course.

ADAM No, then it turned into, like, Schindler’s List.

BETH It was just that it subverted expectations.

BROOM By having the apocalypse in it?

BETH Yeah.

ADAM By having the half-hour of just death.

BROOM It was grim.

BETH Survival.

ADAM The trail of tears.

BROOM Which exactly appeared in Fantasia already. The dinosaurs trudging across the desert.

ADAM So yeah, let’s talk about that music.

BROOM The “Africa” music?

ADAM The whole thing. I called it “Kevin Costner music” because it sounds to me like the music in Dances With Wolves and in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It felt maybe a little antiquated for 2000.

BROOM Sweep. Spectacle. I found the atmosphere of the movie strange, and I didn’t know if the music was trying to compensate for that, or trying to be a part of that. I think the music ended up contributing to my sense of a strange atmosphere. It felt unearthly. I’m surprised you say that the “character development” was something that gripped you, because I felt like the characters were kind of at arm’s length, compared to most Disney movies. I mean, I recognized them, but it was like through a window.

ADAM She was just like Meg from Hercules. Cynical, allied with evil because she has no energy to fight back.

BROOM She wasn’t cynical. She didn’t really have a character. She was the sister to the tough guy, and she said “I don’t know what to think; things are so different now.” That was her whole character.

BETH I didn’t care about her.

BROOM There were the terrible one-liners that —

BETH — all Disney movies have.

BROOM Well, that the worst ones have. That a lot of movies now have. It’s the sound of a room of scriptwriters.

BETH “My blisters have blisters!”

BROOM Your blisters do have blisters. And then there were plot events that fit into this formula. And there wasn’t, for me, a sense of character in between. It sort of made the movie feel like it was happening in a strange other space.

ADAM There was the woman with the strong British accent and the woman with the strong African-American accent!

BROOM Yes. “Shame, shame on you!” She talked like an old lady, but she was in fact the strongest one of them. And that was sort of the revelation of that, the “hitting a rock until it breaks” scene.

ADAM I mean, this movie wasn’t good. It just wasn’t quite the nadir that I was anticipating.

BROOM Yeah, I agree. But this atmosphere; I’m trying to find the word for it. It had… like science fiction sometimes does, it hasn’t been fully realized and that’s part of what makes it unearthly or…

BETH Well, compelling, really. I think it’s part of what was gripping about it, that it had this otherworldly quality.

BROOM Yeah, exactly.

ADAM And pretend dinosaurs that did not have the characteristics of real dinosaurs.

BROOM Well, I think they actually were just lesser-known dinosaurs. They intentionally didn’t pick, like, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex.

BETH Like, not popular dinosaurs.

BROOM Well, I’m not sure about “Carnotaur” — but the black lady was a Styracosaur, and their dog was an Ankylosaur.

ADAM I know that. And he was like an Apatosaur?

BROOM I’m not sure what he was. We can find out. [begins looking it up on Wikipedia] But you know that movie, The Dark Crystal? It’s a quest movie in a fantasy land, but the fantasy is so strange and otherworldly that your investment in the quest is sort of — you look at it in wonder and think “what am I looking at?” This seemed like it might be almost aiming at that.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM A better ending would have been if they all evolved into birds.

BROOM Well that little voice-over at the very end — I was saying cynical stuff the whole time about how they’re all going to die, and then the voice-over said, “Yes, I’m not sure what to tell you.”

BETH “Let’s just remember this moment.”

BROOM Here it is: Aladar is an Iguanodon. Neera, Kron, and Bruton are all Iguanodons as well.

ADAM Yeah, I got that.

BETH Bruton looked a different type of Iguanodon. I guess he was just harder-edged, weathered.

BROOM Baylene was a Brachiosaurus, and Eema was a Styracosaurus. And the pet Ankylosaur was named Url.

ADAM Did you know those off the top of your head? I would have known Ankylosaur as a kid, but not now.

BROOM I said it before I looked it up. And look: “Carnotaurus, meaning ‘meat-eating bull.’ Only one species has been described so far.” It lived in Patagonia. The article does not have a “Carnotaurus in popular culture” section. But we could add it.

ADAM The movie Ice Age plays on the whole mammals versus dinosaurs thing. But that didn’t really get played up here.

BROOM This is very much like The Land Before Time, if we remember that, from 1987 or so [ed: 1988]. A Don Bluth movie, very tacky 80s kind of thing. Oh look at this: “The film was originally supposed to have no dialogue at all, in part to differentiate the film from The Land Before Time, with which Dinosaur shares plot similarities.”

BETH Thank goodness it didn’t.

BROOM I’m surprised at you two for saying “thank goodness!”

BETH It would have been intolerable!

ADAM Because the first six minutes was the worst.

BROOM I’m so surprised! To me, it’s the wisecracking that’s embarrassing.

ADAM But at least it goes down easy.

BETH Yeah, it just makes the time pass more quickly. The CGI just wasn’t that good. It was very noticeable.

ADAM Yeah, the CGI at the beginning looked like a USA television network extravaganza.

BROOM I would say the CGI was inconsistent. Because sometimes it was very good, I thought.

BETH Yeah, sometimes it was good.

BROOM When he got wet, I thought that was really well done. And I thought the live-action-beautiful-backgrounds idea was occasionally effective. I agree that it looked like ten-years-ago CGI, and that we’ve gotten used to a slightly slicker standard. But it’s mostly just that CGI is itself kind of distancing. You don’t really feel like you’re there.

BETH So you would have been okay with a ninety-minute silent dinosaur movie?

BROOM Well, they’d have had to construct it differently, obviously. All the more otherworldly, I would have thought.

BETH Yeah, okay.

ADAM What was the cartoon short we saw about how the seal leads the other seals into the protected cove? It was from one of the forties shorts, I think. There’s one where the seals go through this magical passageway under an island, and they end up in this cove inside an island, where they’re free from predators and it’s very beautiful.

BROOM Really? Are you sure that didn’t happen to the Smurfs?

ADAM Come on, guys.

[Google efforts along the lines of (“seals” “Disney” “island”) turn up nothing]

ADAM I don’t want to get distracted here, but this really happened.

BROOM You’re going to have to dig into it, because I don’t believe you.

ADAM Okay.

BROOM So… this is just like that? Is that what you’re going to say?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH Find the review; I think we’re done.

ADAM Yeah, I don’t have a lot more to say about this other than, you know, if you’re composing the list of the five DIsney movies you absolutely never want to see, this is probably not one of them.

BROOM Really?! Compose it. Which are the five worst?

ADAM I don’t know. It’s too early to say.

BROOM Yeah, I think several of them are yet to come.

[we begin reading the New York Times review, but are interrupted:]

BROOM Okay, it’s been discovered that The White Seal, 1973, by Chuck Jones, is the film Adam had in mind. Good call; the ending is exactly the same.

ADAM That’s what it reminds me of.

[we finish the review]

ADAM That was a weirdly superficial review from A. O. Scott.

BROOM I don’t know, I think he took the time to give it what it deserved, and I’m not sure it deserved different from that.

ADAM I don’t know. “It had so many credits!”

BROOM I think that the over-emphasis on the credits in his review sort of matches the nature of the movie; it’s like, “technically something was done here, but I’m not sure what was done movie-wise.” Do we feel that this is really a Disney feature, that this follows in the footsteps of the tradition in any way?

ADAM Well, I’m glad that it was strange. It was a strangeness that was more interesting than — what was the worst one, The Fox and the Hound?

BROOM That was my least favorite. But, I mean, Mulan was pretty bad. What was the other one there? Oh, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but, no, that was better than this.

ADAM Also redeemingly strange.

BROOM That had a lot more spirit and eccentricity. I would pick that any day to watch over this. My recollection of this was that it was totally run-of-the-mill forgettable, and it turned out to be not, quite, it was a little more than that. But I think it will disappear very quickly, because the strangeness we’re talking about is in subtle tonal things, but what’s really going on is very run-of-the-mill, standard stuff, with stupid jokes. It’s kind of an insult to us. Right?

ADAM In the grand scheme of things, yes.

BROOM Would you show it to children that you cared for?

BETH No.

ADAM I might. It depends what else was on.

BROOM I wouldn’t really care. But I would be disappointed in them if they came to love it. I really made an attempt to watch it as a child would. I tried to be open to —

BETH — emotions that you would feel?

BROOM To the feeling of the space, which seemed to be its main thing. “Now they’re in the white-feeling desert, and now they’re in the blue nighttime.”

BETH Like how you watched Star Wars.

BROOM That’s right. And… I don’t think there was enough there that I would have liked the movie, as a kid. But there was something going for it on that level.

ADAM Do you think this captures the innocence of the pre-9/11 world, or eerily presages the destruction of the post-9/11 world?

BROOM I think the destruction in the movie was more disturbing to us because we are watching it in the post-9/11 world.

ADAM Oh, I’m sorry, I was thinking this movie came out in 2001, because all the DVD previews were from 2001. I was going to say it would be weird if The Emperor’s New Groove was the first post-9/11 one.

BROOM The first post-9/11 movie is Lilo and Stitch.

ADAM Which actually does make sense.

BROOM It was clearly in production before that. But yes, it’s sort of suitably humanist.

ADAM Earnest.

ADAM I thought that had the same dispiritingly humdrum quality as when we go to see all the Oscar-nominated animated shorts. Which I did not do this year. But every year it’s much the same.

BETH Except here we didn’t get to see how long they were in advance.

BROOM This is much shorter than the animated shorts show often is.

BETH No, it’s about the same.

ADAM I think the idea of remaking this was sort of in poor taste, unfortunately. Or maybe it’s just that the individual pieces they chose. I don’t mean to shower this with my negativity, but… everything they picked sounded like they picked it because it sounded like cartoon music. It was very difficult to hear the pieces as anything other than cartoon music. Whereas the cartoons didn’t have any value to them other than as accompaniments to music. Everything was worth less than the individual pieces.

BETH I was thinking about how challenging it must be to start with pieces that exist and try to craft a story to them. They didn’t usually work, but they were interesting. I think we should probably go one by one.

ADAM Any other blanket thoughts before we do that?

BETH I thought the famous-people aspect was really distracting.

ADAM It was a little bit like watching an Oscars presentation from the late nineties.

BROOM Yeah. But I thought the frame was more or less okay. What else could they do?

BETH But why did they need a frame? I think I would have enjoyed it if it was more like one of those early medleys.

BROOM How did you feel about the frame in the original Fantasia, where Deems Taylor talks to you? Do you think that’s too didactic?

BETH I don’t love it, but I think it works better than multiple hosts who are making bad jokes. I think the bad jokiness makes the whole thing feel out of touch. And now weirdly out-dated. It will always feel like that moment. Which I guess is fine, because it’s called Fantasia 2000, but it’s just strange.

ADAM Yeah, the people they picked were unusually dated.

BETH Penn and Teller?

ADAM “Angela Lansbury and Quincy Jones bring you…”

BROOM Well, they each have a sort of significance. But fine, I hear you. It was exactly like an Oscars broadcast.

ADAM I thought it was interesting to watch the original sequence of “The Sorceror’s Apprentice,” which obviously marries famously well with its piece. But they didn’t try to choreograph or illustrate every little note in the piece. Did there really need to be a leaf or an ash or a butterfly wing for every single note in every single piece this time around? That’s what I mean by “in poor taste.” It was just much too literal.

BROOM I definitely agree. I feel like the “Sorceror’s Apprentice” piece being here just points up all of what has gone missing over the generations in between. But you have to remember the sequence this is part of, and that it comes at this historical point. Remember we just watched Mulan and Tarzan. Even the gesture toward art and a respect for their own heritage, toward trying to be classy — even at that Oscars-show level, I want to encourage this. “Good! Go in this direction, guys!” And they don’t. This was an anomaly, and I think Roy Disney had to sort of force it into being.

BETH But if it had been done better, it might have started a tradition. It’s their own fault, I think.

BROOM I think the first Fantasia has so much greater feeling for the music and for what the animation can be, and this one was hampered by the lack of insight into those things in the present day.

BETH They had a lot to live up to.

ADAM The colors and the look were so garish.

BROOM Especially when you see “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” and the color design is so tasteful and effective, everything else is this overblown nineties look. Which I guess they’ve improved somewhat since then. I guess the post-Lilo and Stitch movies have better use of color?

ADAM You’ll find out!

BROOM There’s just a certain sensitivity and taste lacking.

ADAM Yeah, there’s no understatement. Having to have everything magenta and green is the same as having to have a little swoop or flourish for every note, which is the same thing as picking… I mean, these pieces are ludicrous. “The Pines of Rome”? What the hell is that?

BROOM It’s a piece that’s the musical equivalent of exactly what you’re talking about, except it’s the fascist Italian equivalent, it was like Mussolini’s favorite piece or something. [Ed. Okay maybe not… but the association of Respighi with Mussolini’s regime is long-standing if perhaps unfair]

ADAM But it was like a tasteless…

BROOM It’s known for being a tasteless piece, yes.

ADAM Okay.

BROOM You’re saying they didn’t need to match something to every note, and I agree with that, but there were also places where I wanted them to match something in the music and they had neglected to, usually because they’d gone for a very literal approach — “there’s a beat here and there’s a beat here” — rather than feeling the real flow and meaning. Like the “Rhapsody in Blue,” which we’ll talk more about in a second: I felt like they had addressed the largest issues in a reasonable way, and the smallest surface issues in a reasonable way, but the middle-ground of actually feeling what the music was doing, they were sort of blind to it. And that’s what’s so effective about “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”; you really feel that the animation is a proper complement to the piece. All right, let’s go through in order.

ADAM First was the dreadful butterflies piece.

BROOM Beethoven’s Fifth with butterflies. That’s the one that’s most tone-deaf in the sense that I’m talking about.

ADAM Yeah. They start the evil butterflies midway through the first part.

BROOM Right, they introduce the blackness when nothing has shifted in the music. And there’s three elements — rays of light from god, and pastel butterflies, and evil butterflies — but there’s not really three elements in the music. And that the pastel butterflies had to play little games in the water with each other, which doesn’t correspond to anything in the music. And that one of them gets its wing injured by the evil butterflies…

BETH It was harsh.

ADAM And it was so gratuitously CGI. Haven’t they gotten used to CGI by now?

BETH It reminded me of the Donkey Kong video game, when all those spiders would come at you.

BROOM When there’s a mass of them on the screen like that all squirming around, it’s ugly to look at. The first time I saw this I remember being really dismayed. This time I tried to figure out what it was that the artist who made it had cared about. I think there were some layouts that they had felt strongly about.

ADAM The only thing that was at all pleasurable about that was the massed clouds of black and red butterflies.

BROOM Oh, that’s what I’m saying was ugly.

ADAM At least it was something.

BROOM It all displayed a depressing lack of feeling for the piece.

BETH Yes, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.

BROOM It seemed like they thought that making an “abstract” animation for “abstract” music meant not feeling any of the obvious points. Like when it sounds happy or sad. What’s next? “Pines of Rome.”

ADAM What was the accompaniment to that again?

BETH Flying whales.

ADAM Oh man. Well, at least, of all these pieces, that had a weird mysticism that was sort of engaging.

BETH I found it compelling.

BROOM I agree with that. It doesn’t go with the music exactly, but it at least felt the music somewhat.

ADAM When he goes into the ice cave, it is different than when they’re swooping.

BETH That’s exactly when I thought it was the most effective.

BROOM The first movement of that is the worst.

ADAM When they go underwater, before they emerge, that was also effective.

BROOM The finale of “Pines of Rome” is noted for being this infinite march of triumph over and over, and I thought the whales surmounting the clouds, and then the stars, and so on — I thought that was about right. And I didn’t mind it. But that there was a baby one? It’s still sort of a reflex Disney action.

ADAM Every one of these, no matter what, had to have some conflict, no matter how ill-adapted, and had to have some cuteness, no matter how ill-thought-out. Why?

BETH Who is this for? Is it for kids?

ADAM It’s meant to be enriching, isn’t it?

BROOM That’s a question about the original too. I think a lot of the flaws of this are things that many people would say are flaws of the original, but I personally would debate that. We just read an essay where someone knocked it, and that’s kind of the critical party line in a lot of ways, that Fantasia was this supremely tasteless endeavor. But I don’t feel that way. I feel like what Disney had in mind is a legitimate use of animation and a legitimate way of listening to music. And that this one missed the boat because they didn’t feel it, they didn’t know what the answers to those questions were. So I don’t know who this was for. I think it was “whoever Disney movies are for, except our assignment this time is classical music.”

ADAM Then it was “Rhapsody in Blue.” The most stylish, certainly, and the best characterized.

BETH I basically was okay with it.

ADAM There were funny things where they used mood notes in the music to do unlikely things. Like the thing with the nuts. Really?

BROOM There are things in there that are satisfying to me, and then there are other things. In nearly every scene. If they’re going to make Rhapsody in Blue a panorama of the city with six different stories, you’d think that the places they’d switch from story to story would be between the chunks of the music. There are completely discrete themes, and they always plateau out in obvious ways and then the next thing starts. But here it would change in the middle of a melody — it would pan across town to the next guy, and the first half the melody would be synced to one kind of action and the second half to another.

ADAM Maybe that’s meant to be like when Maya Angelou would read her poetry and intentionally not recognize the line breaks.

BROOM Yes, it is like that it. They clearly chose to do it that way intentionally. But you want it to reach this balletic sync where everything flows. When you see the people scurrying to and from the subway out the window, that feels good to me. And when they go down into the subway and everyone’s riding the rhythm, that felt good to me too. But like, the kid who has to work on the construction site? All the stories…

ADAM It was much worse than The Triplets of Belleville, which was the same thing.

BROOM I don’t remember The Triplets of Belleville well enough, but I do remember being irked by it so I’m not sure I’m going to agree.

ADAM It was sort of a jazz fantasia in the same way, with some of the same characters even, like the big woman dragging along the little henpecked man.

BROOM All the stuff they gathered into a “Rhapsody in Blue” world was about right: Hirschfeld, and the color scheme, and the Thurber-type people, the New Yorker cartoon types. And when they pan up and there’s George Gershwin at the piano, it feels earned. “Yeah, he could be there.” But the actual dance of it, and the story-ness of it, felt like it came out of a cartoon playbook that wasn’t as sensitively thought through.

BETH Nonetheless, it was fun.

ADAM Fun to watch.

BROOM It’s a reasonably classy effort. Just flawed.

BETH I think the animators were able to get that piece more than the other ones they were working with, because it’s more accessible to contemporary people.

ADAM I thought having the wistful dream sequence to the American Airlines music — that’s not the only way to do it, but it works.

BROOM But again: that being people dreaming, and that being people skating at Rockefeller Center, seem right to me — but that being people projecting themselves into their fantasies which are to: have a job, play snare drum, fly like a bird, and be loved by your parents… I guess she was sort of a reference to Eloise. But she didn’t look like Eloise, she looked like Little Lulu.

ADAM Apparently the way to be loved by your parents is to run into traffic.

BROOM All the ideas were okay but the directorial instincts were off.

ADAM Next came the toy soldier.

BROOM I believe first there was the flamingos. [Ed. i.e. “Carnival of the Animals.” Incidentally Broom is wrong and Adam is right about the order]

BETH Oh right.

ADAM Harmless.

BROOM I think it was one of the most successful in actually feeling musical. And it has all that sort of strong color direction in the background, but done so correctly, for a change, that you hardly notice it.

BETH Actually, I did appreciate that.

BROOM And the sync to the music was strong and clear and genuinely funny in the way it meant to be, in a musical way.

ADAM Yeah, but it was easy. They clipped the piece of music so it had only one emotion.

BROOM Fine! They did something that had integrity to it. As a complete farcical throwaway, at least it had integrity. In the way that the others felt like they were almost not what they thought they were. This was exactly what it meant to be.

ADAM Somebody tell James Earl Jones! “Flamingos with a yo-yo?”

BROOM I found it satisfying.

ADAM But it was not ambitious.

BROOM A silly thing well-achieved is less uncomfortable for me than grandeur that doesn’t quite know what it’s doing.

ADAM Then the toy soldier. As a story I guess the characters were the best-developed. Sort of. I mean that Jack-in-the-box was creepy. The deus ex fish was a little odd.

BROOM I think that’s in the Hans Christian Andersen story.

ADAM Then fine. I don’t remember a thing about the music.

BROOM Shostakovich Piano Concerto number two. It’s actually one of the most unusual musical choices, repertoire-wise. I liked it okay. I wanted it to have more of the quaint toyshop atmosphere, and their facial expressions sort of prevented that. And the synthetic low-framerate CGI look…

ADAM The pre-Toy Story look.

BROOM It was post-Toy Story but it was intentionally stylized to look early that way. They made them stiff – I think they thought it would make them seem like toys. I wanted it to have more atmosphere and character than it had. It felt sort of smart about the music too, which is more than can be said for other stuff.

ADAM I don’t know. When the rats were there, it wasn’t correct.

BROOM Yeah, it’s a bit forced. Those rats with red eyes came out of other movies. Lady and the Tramp. I like the piece, and I think that way of storifying it isn’t bad, but it never quite lands. If you ask people about this movie more than ten minutes after they’ve seen it, they will not remember that one.

ADAM That’s the one that would win the Oscar, and you’d come out afterward and be like, “That one??”

BROOM It doesn’t have quite enough oomph to it. Then “The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”

ADAM A classic.

BROOM One of the great pieces of animation, I feel like.

BETH It is.

ADAM It fits so perfectly. The music is meant exactly to suggest what is happening there.

BROOM More or less. The dream sequence I think is their own imposition on it, but it’s appropriate. And the illustration is just so perfect. When he goes outside and you see the sunlight, it feels so storybook-satisfying.

BETH And the characterization of the wizard is great. I love at the end when he’s angry but amused, and it shows in very small facial expressions.

BROOM It’s very well done and they don’t got it no more. Then Donald Duck. [Ed.: “Pomp and Circumstance.”] That’s the worst one.

ADAM That was the worst one. Ugh, that was so bad.

BETH Why did they do that?

BROOM Totally tasteless.

ADAM Ugh. Everything about that.

BETH Everything about it.

ADAM The chorus that comes on at the end reminds me a little of… I don’t know, “Gangsta’s Paradise” or something.

BROOM People talk about how Walt was this tyrant, but I think that’s why the movies were better in his day. There was some one person who had a real vision. Once you put it into the hands of the various craftspeople… that obviously was made by professional animators, but it had no vision. No vision.

ADAM Yeah. It was gross. The colors in that were the worst. And then, ugh, Daisy? What were they doing there? And what was with their Three’s Company storyline?

BROOM I can explain it to you if you need. Note that this was Daisy’s first and probably last appearance in a feature film.

ADAM That’s really sad.

BROOM And it’s been a long time since Donald had any role. But this didn’t feel like the real Donald.

ADAM She’s so simpering, and they didn’t look right, and they didn’t have any personality.

BROOM He didn’t do any Donald stuff. And when Noah’s face wasn’t shown, I thought, “it’s just Noah!” If it were God, then I would agree, yes, you should just show his back.

ADAM Is there anything redeeming in it? Um… no.

BETH It’s terrible.

BROOM Some of the animal animation was… competent for those animals.

ADAM After that was the finale, “The Firebird.”

BETH Did you guys like that? I really zoned out.

ADAM No. I wrote poems like that when I was in fourth grade. You know, “The Rebirth.” I could have written that. I remember writing a poem in fourth grade about a homeless man who gets a quarter on the sidewalk and sees “a ray of light across his once-dark valley.” It’s sort of at that same pitch.

BROOM I felt like this was more or less on par with the whales. “Nice try; I’ll go with it because why not, but.”

ADAM I understand that there’s something delicious about spring coming, but why is spring just a rippling aqua-green sheet that doesn’t change? There was nothing inventive about the way they depicted that.

BROOM She seemed like she came out of a Miyazaki movie, sort of Japanese in inspiration.

ADAM The only thing I liked was the firebird’s eye.

BROOM I liked when she made a flower by rubbing her hands together and then made a bigger one by doing it more vigorously.

ADAM There were so few touches like that, given that it was supposed to be this rippling sensuous “life is coming!” It was like the backdrop to the Smurfs when you’d see the same four frames over and over again. And why did she and the firebird look exactly the same? They just had long capes of different colors. And at the end they just gave up. There weren’t even different tones of green! It was really ugly.

BROOM The haunted-castle-is-reborn-as-a-technicolor-castle ending is pretty lame at this point, it’s true. But I felt at least like that one had some connection to the music. So let’s talk about the big picture here. We’ve worked our way through the twentieth century, as Disney has become more and more a set of rote gestures and reflexive not-quite-ideas. And this felt like a good-faith effort to recapture something that they had genuinely forgotten how to think about.

ADAM I think that the whole concept of the year two-thousand, in retrospect, was tasteless and overblown. I have an image of New Year’s Eve nineteen-ninety-nine into two-thousand, of Bill Clinton in a tuxedo, presiding over a ballroom — I remember seeing this on the front page of the newspaper the next day — and that’s exactly right. It’s all the schlockiness of the nineties but done up in this mock-seriousness of the millennium. It’s like — do you remember the commencement ceremony where they gave Nelson Mandela the honorary degree? It’s like that. It has all that inflated sense of self-worth, but also this gross… the whole concept of the year two-thousand in retrospect is stupid and embarrassing. But pompous at the same time. And this movie is the kind of thing that summarized the year two-thousand, to me.

BROOM I don’t think this movie was made because it was the year two-thousand.

ADAM I know, it’s like Windows 2000.

BROOM Calling it that does make it sound like a Microsoft product. Or a Chessmaster. When people write about Fantasia nineteen-forty, they talk about things like whether it’s a legitimate artistic project or just kitsch, whether it shows Disney’s limitations or shows him at the height of his art. Whereas when you read people talking about this one, the context and the framework for thinking about what kinds of products might come out of a cultural factory like Disney is so much narrower. The ambition implicit in the project isn’t actually active, alive. There is no one who was working on this who was motivated by the idea “we will make music come alive with animation!”

BETH People by that point had such a different relation to classical music than they did in nineteen-forty to begin with. I think it was probably difficult to muster that.

ADAM Yeah, people are more illiterate listening to classical music by an order of magnitude than they were in nineteen-forty. So maybe you have to hit people over the head.

BROOM You’re talking about the audience, but she and I are talking about the people who made it. Not to be overly grandiose, but the original inspiration seems right: animation seems like an art with affinities to classical music. And that these people don’t feel that seems to me symptomatic of their not really feeling animation. Animation art in the nineties — as we talk about these movies we lower and lower our expectations because the minds making it seem to have smaller and smaller ideals.

ADAM There’s maybe a reason no-one has ever undertaken the project we’re undertaking.

BROOM Because it’s depressing?

ADAM Yeah. I mean, it’s worth doing now that we’re so far along, but I didn’t realize we were going to flame out in mediocrity.

BROOM Did you not know that?

ADAM It is not my recollection.

BROOM When you look at the present day do you not feel that you are in the midst of the flame-out-in-mediocrity of most culture?

ADAM I feel like I often draw my attention to forms of culture that were not in existence a hundred years ago, and those feel exciting and have no reference point.

BROOM Like what?

ADAM Well, you probably don’t go to a lot of electronic dance parties, but… I do. And that is a thing I can appreciate without having to think, like, “ugh, I wish it was nineteen-thirty!”

BROOM But you don’t see it as the same form as the dance party of nineteen-thirty where the music was in fact so much richer and better?

ADAM No. Or, like, you know, HBO series.

BROOM Beth was doing a workout video earlier today, and the music in the workout video is this electronic pulse like in a thriller movie, just pounding over and over. And I was thinking, “why is it so grim and robotic?” And I was trying to think what the music was like in the Jane Fonda Workout video we had when I was a kid. I assume it was exuberant.

BETH I remember what it was like. It’s slow, like, [commercial soft-rock beat].

BROOM I’m not going to say that nineteen-eighty-five or whatever year that was was a high point for the human spirit or anything, but at least that music is about feeling good. It seemed like this music was about continuing to live out some kind of fantasy that you were like a robot on a track.

BETH I didn’t even hear it though.

ADAM I don’t know, have you been to one of the redesigned Starbucks? There’s new Starbucks now where all of the finishes are extremely dark wood and more natural, and it’s nice. It’s nicer than the old ones. There are things about modern life that are fine. We went through a great period of riotous architecture in the last ten years. All kinds of things. But living among forms of art where the air has gone out is depressing.

BROOM You know that I would take issue with saying that this is a heyday for architecture. I feel like a lot of it is anti-human in various subtle ways. I feel like a lot of this stuff lacks a humanist impulse. So maybe you think that we’re in a heyday of animation too; you don’t need to agree with me.

ADAM We’re obviously not. I obviously don’t think that.

BROOM How did you feel about Toy Story 3?

ADAM It was really sad. It was not as good as everyone said it was, but it was good. Ratatouille is as good as Bambi.

BROOM I disagree.

ADAM Well, Spirited Away is as good as anything in animation. It’s as haunting and moving to me as any work of animation I’ve ever seen.

BROOM It definitely is its own thing. It feels legitimate.

ADAM So fine, this one company that became a massive corporate conglomerate and one of the twenty-five largest corporations in the United States, yeah, they maybe don’t have the gift anymore.

BROOM Well, as David Thomson writes, Walt Disney is probably the most influential person in the history of the aesthetics of the medium of film. The ideas and the ideals of Walt Disney have such a huge sway. You can disagree with that as a claim, but there’s definitely an importance to what the Disney company believes in. And I feel like they think they’re believing in the same thing they always have, but it’s actually shrunken down to a tiny little hole that they’re looking through.

BETH As the rest of culture has pressed it in, I think.

BROOM You can say that, but I think there’s no reason that they couldn’t have gathered to them the people who still had that vision.

ADAM Well they don’t have any writers. They don’t have any artists. They just have illustrators.

BROOM They put “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in this movie because it can still be released to the public now. The piece really hasn’t aged in any way, in any sense that relates to people and the way they listen to music or the way they look at film. It’s just that we don’t have the people who can make it anymore, because the ideas that need to be in the heads of the artists are not in very many people’s heads anymore, and the company doesn’t know how to prioritize those kinds of ideas. They don’t even distinguish.

BETH But it’s also that the kids who decide to become artists — there are fewer opportunities for them to be artists now, so they end up with very technically-minded animators. That’s who succeeds in the business now.

BROOM I guess the saddest thing is that it feels so strongly like it lacks heart, and also that the accusation that it lacks heart is so period-specific that it’s not even legitimate to level against the movie, because that’s just the kind of world that it’s from. Why should we feel comfortable saying that there was a time in history that lacked heart? Do we say that of any other times? Do we say it about the fifties? Maybe.

BETH Yeah, a little.

ADAM I think this has more to do with the fact that we’re a certain age than anything else. This is every old person’s lament. Although in this case it’s a lament about our own childhoods.

BETH Everyone throughout history has always said that everything’s worse than it was before. For any given time. When are things not going to hell?

ADAM Yeah, cheer up!

BROOM I try to keep that in mind. I try not to be that person. But the thing here — it’s not going to hell, it’s just losing sight of itself. It’s frustrating because there’s nothing stopping them except for the cultural norms. It takes a stronger vision to make something sensible and humanist now because the culture less and less has that stuff implicit in it.

ADAM Irony’s about to end.

BETH That was going to happen ten years ago.

BROOM He’s saying it ironically.

ADAM No, I’m saying by the time the next movie comes out, irony will have ended.

BROOM But that’s simply not the case. As you well know.

[we read the Times review]

ADAM Stephen Holden’s not a very good writer. It was both poorly thought out and poorly organized, and really wordy.

MIKE The storyline seemed very similar to Avatar.

ADAM It’s true. It felt like an archetype.

BROOM In that he leads the bad guys to the secret place in the forest and betrays his tribe. But here he is one of the tribe, unlike in Avatar. Avatar is more interesting than this.

BETH I thought this was pretty dull, except that the action sequences were well done.

ADAM Oh, come on. Come on, everyone! Didn’t this touch your heart?

BETH Not that much.

ADAM No?

BROOM This was like my least favorite in a while. That’s where I’m coming from.

ADAM What? What??

BROOM I was sleepier this time than usual, but yes.

BETH It looked like you were about to fall asleep for most of it.

BROOM I was waiting for something to be meaningful to me but it felt totally synthetic.

ADAM I was very touched by the rank sentimentality of this movie.

BETH I think it must be your mood or something.

BROOM The opening, the stuff about his parents dying, I was willing to take that as something. But all the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff, I felt distant from it.

BETH I enjoyed the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff! That was fun to watch.

ADAM I mean, like… yes, we keep seeing the same movie over and over again, everyone, that’s true. In Pocahontas, she went away with him at the end, but basically the same concept.

BETH I actually liked the woman here; I thought that she had…

ADAM She had a goofy personality.

BETH And she looked kind of like Maggie Gyllenhaal.

MIKE But aren’t their weird button noses and pointed chins some kind of… bizarre Anglo-beauty?

ADAM They felt anime-ish.

BROOM They felt comic book fetish-ized, to me. Which is another way of saying the same thing.

ADAM But I enjoy that.

BROOM This one had more of that skeevy geek-sex veneer on it than any of them.

BETH Because of how Tarzan looked?

BROOM You know, there are certain lines on the physique that don’t really exist in real life, but they exist in people’s sex-minds. Something about the way his legs met his body wasn’t anatomically realistic but it certainly had fetish value. And that skeeves me. And the whole thing, even the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff, it’s got this amped-up synthetic quality.

ADAM I frankly enjoyed his unnatural physique. Finally the shoe was on the other foot, gender-wise.

BROOM But I’m saying the same thing about her. Her design also tweaked in a direction that doesn’t have anything to do with “character.”

BETH She almost looked more anime than other Disney characters. Her eyes were way too big.

ADAM She does continue the tradition of Disney heroines who are very much unlike their squat-nosed, bizarre fathers.

BROOM Yeah, what a terrible character the father was. Adam, isn’t this the movie about which those self-righteous people in [college dormitory] said “Can you believe they wanted to cast Chris Rock? And he was like ‘No way man, no way am I playing a monkey!’ They just don’t get it! Can you believe how insensitive Disney is?” And you and I said, “as the Rosie O’Donnell part? It would have been exactly the same with Chris Rock. It has nothing to do with race.” Who played Kerchak?

BETH I wondered that too. But I missed it.

ADAM Not a black man.

BROOM And was the mother Glenn Close?

BETH Glenn Close??

BROOM That’s what I think I read in the DVD info.

BETH Okay, I believe it.

ADAM Well, it does kind of have to do with race. In the way that Dances With Wolves did. Like, it’s sort of weird that this charismatic white man can become the leader of these, you know, apes, just because of his awesomeness.

BROOM Well, it doesn’t even feel right on the movie’s terms. How can he be the dominant male? We were making jokes about it because it doesn’t make any sense.

ADAM He is obviously not stronger than the other males in the band.

BROOM I haven’t read Tarzan or seen any prior Tarzan movies, but isn’t the story that he does go back to England, and lives between both worlds?

ADAM But then it would be hard to have the villain character.

BROOM Well, they made up this stupid villain character. I’m saying this is a much less interesting story.

ADAM Isn’t this also the story of The Jungle Book, by the way?

MIKE Mowgli.

BROOM Yeah, that’s right. He’s raised by wolves.

BETH And then he meets that girl.

BROOM Exactly — he goes to live with the humans, which is what he’s supposed to do. The Jungle Book is much better than this.

ADAM I found the Phil Collins score extremely effective and touching.

BROOM I certainly thought he did a better job than Elton John.

BETH It was very restrained. They didn’t overdo “musical numbers” at all; there really weren’t any.

ADAM There were like five.

BROOM I think “Trashing the Camp” is pretty awful.

ADAM As a musical number.

BROOM Clearly someone was like, “They can do ‘Stomp’! It can be like that great show ‘Stomp’!” Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to do that in animation.

BETH The music just wasn’t as cheesy as it usually is.

BROOM Because it wasn’t Alan Menken and it wasn’t Elton John.

ADAM And it did feel very period.

BROOM I thought the songs were actually not bad. “You’ll Be In My Heart” is actually not a bad song.

ADAM “I Wanna Know”: also a song that I have caught myself singing many times.

BROOM I thought that sequence was okay, even though it didn’t make sense that they were teaching him about all these things when he had no human language at all.

ADAM Did you enjoy it, Mike? Did you not enjoy it?

MIKE It was okay.

ADAM Could you elaborate?

MIKE I wouldn’t rent it again.

BETH We won’t.

BROOM I thought — especially at the beginning; I think it actually got better later — that the editing pace had been goosed up significantly from where it had been, in a way that numbs me.

BETH You felt like it was more our current era?

BROOM Yeah, I felt like it leapt forward into that sense of, like… and I was thinking, “Is this because I’ve gotten a chip on my shoulder about this issue and I’m sensitized to it?” but, you know, I’d seen this before and it just went in one ear and out the other, and I think it’s going to do that this time too. And it has something to do with that. When the visual gets so stylized and the cutting gets so fast, it just starts be like a wash of… stuff.

ADAM We were watching a trailer today for Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, which we considered seeing today.

BROOM I gather it’s very bad.

ADAM And it’s cut like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Like, there’s a lot of, like, a gun fires and then there’s like fwoooosh! [indicating awesome camera motion]. And this does have a complement of that.

BROOM This was like that. It was cut like a trailer. It has that kinetic…

ADAM Because we’re too bored to just watch a movie.

BROOM I use this word “fetish” all the time, and I need more words for this, but there’s just this way of dealing with the surface as surface, and that’s the level of interest. The early Disney movies — you think of Dumbo and the love of his mother, which is the same thing they were going for here — that’s all about feelings and the characters, where this just felt like it was about a “look and feel.”

ADAM I would like to stand up for this movie, because I enjoyed it very much at the time; it was one of my favorites of the nineties ones, and still is. Even though it is a little sentimental — but they’re all a little bit sentimental. Even though it’s a little bit archetypal — but they all are.

BROOM I don’t object to the sentimentality. I would rather they’d have laid that on thick, because that would have been something. But the elephant, and Rosie O’Donnell…

ADAM You just hate sidekicks.

BROOM I do hate sidekicks. And the conflict with Kerchak? None of that meant anything to me; it all seemed really to be about whoosh! whoosh! boof! chh! whoosh! When the gorilla went up into the treehouse at the beginning, and we see that it’s all ruined, I was almost going to ask, “did we already see what happened here? Were we supposed to already know that this is what she was going to find?” We’ve only been watching the movie for two minutes, and I already don’t know whether I’m missing information, because it’s all been this quick cutting…

BETH Well, it’s a montage. That whole opening was a montage.

BROOM But like a trailer. A fast montage where you just get a sort of general impression.

ADAM So the movie was too complex for you.

BROOM I thought that! I thought: this very fast montage technique, either it’s a high-intellectual art sort of thing, or it’s something where you’re just supposed to space out. In music videos where that style was popularized in the eighties, you weren’t supposed to be having individual thoughts like “oh, now they’re singing in that room again! — oh, now it’s that fish tank again! —” It’s just stuff, and you sort of roll with it.

BETH Yeah, but you know, music videos were much slower than this.

BROOM That’s true too. This was even faster. It just makes me glaze over, and then they sort of designed the movie so that it doesn’t matter if you glaze over.

BETH So you think this was the beginning of a trend, of that.

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM Well, I’m sorry everyone.

BROOM It’s really pretty. The production was really, really high quality.

BETH The background illustrations were among the best we’ve seen.

BROOM Technically really good.

BETH Yeah. Except for the faces. I didn’t think the faces were good.

ADAM The villainy could have been a little more complex, I’ll grant you that. Like, couldn’t they tell that he was a bad dude from the beginning? Evidently not.

BROOM And the jokes. And everything.

ADAM Is Avatar really a better movie than this? Or is it just a prettier movie than this?

BROOM I think Avatar is a more interesting story if you’re going to follow the story, because the guy is sent in and has to learn the ways of the native culture, and then he’s conflicted when he betrays them because he’s made himself be of two worlds. Whereas here it’s just dumped on him.

ADAM Well that really is more Dances With Wolves than this.

BROOM And Avatar had a bunch of distinct sequences to it. It had the part where he learned to fly on a dragon bird…

ADAM This had the montage where he learns to, like, use vines.

BETH That was the montage when he grew up, right?

BROOM And it had a very long fight with a leopard. And you started looking at your phone —

BETH Sorry.

BROOM And I thought, “When she looks up, I’m going to call her out and ask her, Beth, how did the leopard die?” But you looked at your phone for four minutes, and when you looked back, he was still fighting the leopard. You didn’t miss anything. I couldn’t even throw it back at you, because you were right, it was a waste of our time.

MIKE This movie came out in ’99. Economically the modes of production are shifting pretty dramatically. And you have the internet, and media companies thinking about convergence. And I gotta think there was something about this that we’re not getting. Like, there was a video game series already built into this, or it was an internet play. There was something about this that was a commercial —

BROOM Well, a Broadway show was supposed to have been built into this, because of the success of Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. And they tried it, eventually. It happened. It just didn’t do as well as those.

BETH It has video game characteristics.

BROOM I thought cause-and-effect there went the other way. I’m not kidding about Sonic The Hedgehog; that’s where that comes from. But as for franchise potential… I mean, since Aladdin they’d been making video games when they made the movies. Maybe even earlier.

MIKE I guess the internet is the thing that I would think had some influence. I don’t know, it’s just interesting.

ADAM Disney is, of course, now 0 for 2 on movies set in Africa featuring black people.

BROOM What is 1?

ADAM The Lion King.

MIKE I thought The Lion King was a home run.

ADAM There’s no black people in The Lion King either.

BETH Oh, oh, I see what you’re saying.

BROOM His mother was black, right?

ADAM Well, she’s voiced by a black woman.

MIKE Why can’t Disney, the company, be coming out with different formats for around the world? Like, why aren’t they producing an Indian-ized animated film, and an Asian one…

ADAM Like an Aladdin set in Asia?

MIKE Yeah.

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM He does have a striking physique for someone who presumably was raised on insects and fruit.

BROOM Kerchak was Lance Henriksen. And it was Wayne Knight as the elephant. We were just asking what happened to him.

ADAM They know better than to cast Morgan Freeman as the head ape.

BROOM It was pretty, you know. But so is Bambi.

BETH It wasn’t bad. It actually was fine.

ADAM It picked up a lot in the second half, I think.

BROOM Oh, I’m going to say that it was bad, and that in the second half I really lost my willingness to humor it.

ADAM Well, I thought at least things were happening in the second half that were not creaky Disney “I wanna get out of this place” setup.

BROOM I thought the “I wanna get out of this place” was a little forced, but I thought the basic premise of this movie was not necessarily mishandled. But after it became action sequences and denouement it was all completely fumbled. That’s how I felt.

BETH Why?

BROOM As you said, Adam: six Huns survive the avalanche, and then hold all of China hostage by showing up at the victory celebration and grabbing the emperor — it doesn’t make any sense. So the entire last act made no sense.

ADAM It was gripping.

BROOM It didn’t make sense literally or emotionally. The amount that she saved the day in the first climax was no less than the amount that she saved them all again later, so the turnaround of “now we accept her and will change our sexist ways” at the end — but not after the avalanche — was totally undeserved. The story didn’t earn us anything at any point after they got to the snow. And if the thing with the avalanche had been the climax of the whole movie, I would have rolled with it… but it was pretty stupid.

ADAM You have to admit it was pretty compelling when she moved the cannon suddenly off course, and you’re like “What are you doing??”

BROOM You already know what she’s doing, because you see her look up at the mountain.

ADAM I know — but if you didn’t know that, though!

BROOM Up to there, I was like, “this movie has some things going for it,” but after that I couldn’t do it anymore.

BETH But I found all of the ridiculousness entertaining. Yes, compelling. Who cared?

ADAM Beth, give us the woman’s point of view.

BROOM Yes, how did you feel about the feminism?

BETH I don’t really think of myself as a feminist, so…

BROOM Why not?

BETH I just don’t like the label. I’m a woman.

BROOM Do you think it’s a feminist or a not-feminist joke, when the men are dressed up as women and he says “any questions?” and one says “does this dress make me look fat?”

BETH Non-feminist.

ADAM This movie is obviously responding to the criticism of all the Disney heroines. It’s like, “Fine! You think that Disney heroines are passive princesses? Take that!”

BROOM She had almost no breasts at all.

ADAM And two parents!

BETH That’s true. The mom was not very prominent, though, because they didn’t know how to make a mom who was actually a nice person and well-rounded.

BROOM She was complicit in the subjugation-of-women sequence at the beginning. She was part of the problem.

BETH That’s true, but she wasn’t the evil stepmother, which is more of a character for Disney.

BROOM The matchmaker here.

BETH They have never done, like, the loving mother. Have they?

ADAM I think Bambi might have had a loving mother.

BROOM The fairy godmother.

BETH Yeah, Bambi, fine.

BROOM The Rescuers Down Under had a loving mother.

ADAM Dumbo had a loving mother.

BROOM Yeah! That’s right. They, like, blew it out in 1941 and it’s never gonna happen again.

ADAM This movie did seem a little calculated to appeal to both P.C. critics of their female characters and Asian markets.

BROOM I don’t know that it appeals to Asian markets; it appeals to Asian interest groups.

ADAM They prepared it in part to be successful in overseas sales, like in China and Japan.

BROOM And was it? Moreso than the ones where the characters were not so ostensibly Asian?

ADAM I do not remember, but if I recall correctly, they took some care to actually choose, like, an authentic Chinese legend. Editor, check on that.

[Ed.: Yes, the legend is authentic, but I can’t find anyone claiming that it was chosen as a business calculation. Apparently there was some hope at Disney that this movie might mend its relations with China, which had soured after the release of the Dalai Lama-adoring Kundun in 1997, which Disney distributed. China did eventually allow Mulan to be seen but it did not do well.]

BROOM It didn’t seem authentically Chinese in any way; it seemed completely contrived.

ADAM Having a dragon named Mushu played by Eddie Murphy is a giveaway.

BROOM None of it felt natural. It was embarrassing if you paid attention to it, so we didn’t. Right? Am I right?

ADAM The Chinese-ness?

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM Those ancestors really made me understand the concept of filial piety.

BROOM Why didn’t the stone dragon come to life? It didn’t make any sense.

BETH Why was it outside and they were inside?

ADAM Because it was so powerful.

BROOM And the… It was just all a crock of shit; there’s no getting into it. Was this movie better than Pocahontas?

ADAM Yes. There was better character development. Mulan was a character that you actually believed in.

BROOM Yes, Mulan was more sympathetic than anyone in Pocahontas.

BETH It seemed like different things were happening than usually happen in Disney movies, and that’s why I was okay with this movie.

BROOM Such as?

BETH Such as gray zombie Huns coming to life.

ADAM Well, that happened in The Black Cauldron.

BETH Well, that was a good one!

ADAM The fussbudget pseudo-villain was not as gay as normal. That was good.

BROOM Who? Oh right, the officious snaggletoothed guy.

BETH Not as gay. But there were still references.

ADAM That was certainly the hunkiest Asian man I’ve ever seen.

BETH Who was somehow completely awkward around women.

ADAM Well, he knows an army life.

BROOM Just to return to what was so terrible at the end: that the guys dressed up as women and shimmied up the poles like she had in training, and they played the music from before like it was all a callback, like it had all been leading up to this, which in no way was a payoff to any of those things. It was all forced.

BETH It just didn’t bother me.

BROOM That last sequence, I just felt like there was nothing onscreen that I could care about. Except for flashing colors.

ADAM She wasn’t that pretty. I mean, that was satisfying, right?

BROOM She was fairly pretty.

BETH She was pretty. Prettier than all the other marriage candidates.

ADAM And the other soldiers. But she was not prettier than, like, Cinderella.

BETH She was not the typical bombshell.

ADAM She was Asian.

BROOM I want you guys to say something along with me here — that to be accepting this shows that our standards have dropped exponentially.

BETH Oh, yeah! I can admit that. This is not good! This is not good.

ADAM Not as good as Dumbo.

BROOM How does this compare to The Hunchback of Notre Dame?

ADAM I thought The Hunchback of Notre Dame had a fearsome energy that redeemed its terribleness.

BROOM I thought The Hunchback of Notre Dame was mistaken from the get-go, and really terrible in lots of ways, but it was competent on some level that this lacked… Well, I mean, this was obviously “competent,” as work…

BETH I thought the backgrounds were nice.

BROOM I thought the animation was generally nice.

BETH I thought the CGI was eh.

ADAM I think these might have been the most generic songs since The Fox and the Hound.

BROOM They were bad; they were very undistinguished. But that one that we’ve been singing since we first saw it is really fun.

ADAM [singing:] “I know why I…” I don’t even remember the lyrics, but it sounds like every other Disney song.

BROOM [singing:] “Let’s get down to business / to defeat / the Huns!” That’s a terrible terrible song, but it’s done with gusto.

ADAM [singing:] “Did they send me daughters / when I asked…”

BROOM Wait for it…

ADAM [singing:] “… for sons?” Yes.

BROOM And I actually kind of liked the “epic” musical cue when she makes the decision to go in her father’s place.

BETH That weird synth thing?

BROOM Yeah, with like an 80s synth going.

BETH I thought that was cool too, but it seemed strange.

BROOM The movie several times had moments that were like comic book, like, “YESSSSS!” Like that 80s music…

ADAM The Hun punching through the snow! And the roof.

BROOM And the way the “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” sequence was directed, with a lot of awesome sword-swiveling.

BETH It was like Karate Kid, a little bit.

BROOM It seemed like it had some real geeks working on the animation staff.

ADAM Think about the songs for a second; think only back to Beauty and the Beast. In Beauty and the Beast there are at least three songs that we can all sing happily and that are pretty good. Even the notes of these songs were generic and bad.

BETH Just hearing us try to sing that song, none of us could find a note to actually sing.

BROOM I don’t know how they ended up with this Matthew Wilder guy.

ADAM “Mysterious as the dark side of the moon!” Can you sing any other song from it?

BETH I won’t be able to sing that one tomorrow.

BROOM [faking:] “Do your parents proud and marry a man, man, man!”

ADAM Can you sing “A Girl Worth Fighting For?” That was the most weirdly generic of all of them.

BROOM They were like, “You know that song the guys sing in South Pacific? They should sing that.”

ADAM At that point, why even do a musical?

BROOM Well, exactly. “Why even do” many of the things they did. Why put comedy in this movie? It didn’t feel like they thought it was funny. It was the worst comedy yet.

ADAM It was just the most half-assed.

BROOM I thought even the slapstick, which doesn’t have to necessarily involve writers, was terrible.

ADAM I thought it was funny when the cricket confesses that he’s not lucky, and Eddie Murphy asks the horse, “what are you, a sheep?” That’s pretty funny.

BROOM I’m not going to say “pretty funny.” I thought the first time he called it a cow for no reason was a little funny. Then he did it four more times.

ADAM Eddie Murphy clearly giggling all the way to the bank on this one.

BETH It seemed like he was enjoying himself.

BROOM Really? I think he walked to the bank stony-faced.

ADAM Do you think he was prouder of this than Norbit?

BROOM I don’t think pride enters into his equation these days.

BETH What about twelve years ago?

BROOM I think he has other stuff going on in his life.

BETH Tower Heist?

ADAM This movie’s just not that memorable.

BETH No, but I wasn’t constantly looking at how much time had elapsed, which is always my indicator.

ADAM I was a little at the beginning.

BETH Yeah, maybe for the first fifteen minutes I was.

BROOM I never look at the clock. I find hating these things pretty occupying. I never think, “let it be over with!” I’m watching it the whole time, thinking about it the whole time, but it was pretty negative. So I think Pocahontas was worse than this, but…

ADAM Pocahontas was boring. This was just kind of a journeyman effort.

BETH Can we rank the last five?

BROOM They were Hercules, Hunchback, Pocahontas, and then The Lion King, which I think we agree was better. So just those four post-Lion King.

BETH So then it would be Hercules, Hunchback, this, and then Pocahontas.

BROOM I agree with that.

ADAM Clearly. And what’s next, Tarzan?

BROOM Yes.

ADAM I think Tarzan is great!

BROOM Because he has the biggest pecs.

ADAM You thought Hercules was muscular! I think also Rosie O’Donnell is in Tarzan.

(we read the New York Times review)

BETH Wow, that is harsh.

BROOM But right!

BETH Yeah, but it just doesn’t seem worth it.

ADAM Come on, Janet.

BETH I just didn’t dislike it as much as that.

ADAM It was fine.

BROOM I respect you two for continuing to do this.

(yes, this is really the last frame of the movie!)

BROOM It’s a film without heart. And there’s really no other way to cut it: it’s detrimental to a movie not to have any heart. I feel like they knew that they were making a movie without heart, but I don’t think they realized that you can’t get through a ninety-minute movie without there being something to latch on to.

BETH We got through it.

ADAM I actually found it a pleasurable experience to watch. I was gripped. I mean, I understood that it was being cheesy and cynical, but I also responded to all the trite devices and the cheap heart-tugging.

BROOM Well, honestly… Beth, I knew that you don’t like things like that, and that affected my watching, but I basically find it totally watchable. There’s nothing that I feel obligated to be annoyed by, and it’s very colorful and lively to watch.

BETH It was colorful but I found the characters very ugly. You guys didn’t? Her hair was so distracting to me.

BROOM I did wonder at one point what was driving it up and back.

BETH It was flat on the top and then went out. And his chin was annoying.

ADAM They were supposed to look like vases.

BROOM They were attempting stylization that I guess didn’t work for you.

BETH And the ears being curls…

BROOM I think Hades is a very well designed and animated character, above their normal standards. I think he’s really well drawn. Did you not find that?

BETH I agree with you. I think they cared more about making him interesting than they did about the other characters. Meg was just like a…

ADAM Throwaway femme fatale?

BETH She had a great voice; who was that?

BROOM Susan Egan. She’s a Broadway-type person. I remember being so glad that they had put this Meg character in there instead of a typical princess — not on some feminist grounds, but just because this is more interesting. Sarcasm, even if it’s all rote sarcasm, is more fun to watch. I didn’t like her mouth very much.

BETH I didn’t either.

BROOM But I did like the kind of presence she was.

ADAM What does it mean that there were no fewer than three characters who were like vaudevillian Jews, and that was the joke?

BROOM Explain.

ADAM Well, Danny DeVito and James Woods, and that other guy, the guy who played Hermes, were all playing the same character…

BROOM Paul Shaffer?? I disagree with this.

ADAM Well, all right, but at very minimum, Danny DeVito and James Woods are doing the same schtick, which is some kind of broad…

BROOM New Yawk!

ADAM Well… “I’m walkin’ here!”

BROOM That was just part of a string of “get it? it’s New York!” jokes.

ADAM I know, but they used both blackness and Jewish-ness as a way to add humorous touches to a pretty, you know…

BETH How did we feel about the gospel singers?

BROOM They were the Muses, did you get that?

BETH I got that.

ADAM I mean, whatever, what else were you going to do with the Muses? At least they were interesting to listen to.

BETH Would it be done that way now?

ADAM What, to use ethnicity as a harmless spice? And joke?

BETH With the obese one? Would they do that now?

BROOM You’re right, they probably wouldn’t do that now, only fourteen years later.

ADAM What I thought about during this entire movie was Tiny Toons.

BETH I thought of Ren and Stimpy because of those two…

ADAM Yeah, Pain and Panic are Ren and Stimpy. But I loved, as a kid, the eyebrow-arching grown-up humor that was the fact that they were doing this vaudeville number in the guise of a kid’s cartoon. I loved that. And I would have thought that the Hades character was so clever… if I had been younger than eighteen. I think by eighteen I was aging out of it.

BROOM Did you see this in the theater?

ADAM Mm-hm.

BROOM Did you enjoy it at the time?

ADAM Mm-hm.

BROOM I remember thinking that it was too noisy and it was trying too hard. The part I was most embarrassed and annoyed by was…

ADAM The celebrity sequence?

BROOM Yes, the “Zero to Hero” sequence — “Disney joking about merchandizing!”

ADAM Which also inspired the most favorable comments in the reviews. I’m sure you will see that they are pleased about the meta, irony, self-referential poking-fun. It’s actually very much like Shrek, which had the same joke in it. Shrek had, like, Jeffrey Katzenberg jokes in it.

BROOM Did it?

ADAM Yeah, and I thought that was really funny, again, at that point.

BROOM I thought Shrek sort of had jokes about Disney, and it felt different there because it wasn’t quite claiming to be at its own expense. Shrek bemusedly finds himself in, you know, John Lithgow’s bad Disneyland, and I thought that was funny at the time because it seemed actually cynical. Whereas here, since they are Disney, they’re clearly trying to score points for supposedly not buying into their own brand.

ADAM Yeah, this was more Jay Leno than David Letterman.

BROOM Well said.

ADAM Which also feels very much of a period.

BROOM But to what you were saying about Tiny Toons — I didn’t watch Tiny Toons, but it was just a weak-tea television version of old Looney Tunes, right?

ADAM No, it was more Jewish-y.

BETH More conceptual.

ADAM Remember when the Muppet Babies would open a door on to, like, old black-and-white movies? I thought that was really funny too. Same kind of funny. It was more quotation.

BROOM But that’s how Looney Tunes were! Why do you think Mae West kept showing up in Looney Tunes?

ADAM Maybe I didn’t get that.

BROOM And I was thinking about Looney Tunes, here, when they would do quotations of pop culture that were initially abrasive to me — like doing The Karate Kid — but then I thought, “well, in old Looney Tunes they would do that too.” They wanted to make a Looney Tunes style movie, so they’re entitled.

BETH Well, Looney Tunes aren’t Disney. So here you feel like you’re betrayed by that.

BROOM I think the problem is that you end up with this mix where you have to think, “well, what kind of movie is this?”

ADAM There were even Looney Tunes sound gags and cutaways.

BROOM If you’re going to make a movie where people get a tall lump on their head after they get bonked…

ADAM I’m glad they only had one Tex Avery number, but they really went for it.

BROOM Which?

ADAM The horse!

BROOM Oh, the Tex Avery seduction.

BETH Oh yeah…!

BROOM Why, what about the horse makes you say it like that?

BETH I don’t know, it was just strikingly porn-horse.

ADAM Didn’t you think it was funny later when Pain was cornered by him and said “But I really was attracted to you!” Maybe I’m more of a sucker for that stuff.

BROOM No, look, I honestly think it’s funny when he says “Hercules is a very common name; remember a few years ago when every boy was called Jason and every girl was called Brittany?” It’s okay with me. But I’m saying the problem is, once you’re in that mode, you think, “well then why do I have to watch her sing “I’m not going to say I’m in love”? It has nothing to do with the type of movie we’re in.”

ADAM It was a good song.

BROOM Eh.

ADAM A professional song.

BETH That song sounded like the introduction to a TV show from 1986. And I like that! But it didn’t make sense. I didn’t think any of the songs made sense.

BROOM I didn’t think any of the songs were well staged. Here’s this song where she’s saying “I won’t admit it” and the chorus is singing “admit it, girl, admit it!” And they staged that with her sort of pacing around in a circle, and they were statues. And that was it! Nothing happened.

ADAM I’ll admit I was a little moved by “Go the Distance.”

BROOM Yeah, I was a little moved by the first one, when he felt like he didn’t belong.

ADAM Yeah, not the Michael Bolton version. Whoever was singing that has a really lovely voice.

BROOM It was Roger Bart, of Broadway fame.

ADAM Well, he sounded really good. And it was moving. I empathize with feeling ostracized because of your superhuman strength and golden tresses.

BROOM I can relate! To feeling like maybe I’m the child of the gods and don’t belong here on earth.

ADAM Isn’t this a little like Harry Potter? In the sense that — Harry Potter is a dumb jock, right? And Hercules and Zeus are clearly, like, dumb, WASPy jocks, but they prevail over the…

BROOM The thing about Harry Potter is that even though he is just a dumb kid, there’s this aura in the storytelling of, like, “He’s very, very important. His feelings are important!” Whereas here, Hercules just happens to be Hercules, and we can laugh at him.

ADAM In fairness to them: I think we all agreed that they pretty much played out Broadway sincerity by this point. So what were they going to do, if not this?

BROOM I just think there was a mismatch between Alan Menken’s doo-wop Broadway, and the spirit of this movie, which wanted to be like BLAM! BLONK! And they shouldn’t really have been singing.

ADAM Well, in the battle between Alan Menken and David Spade, David Spade’s gonna win!

BROOM There is a song in Emperor’s New Groove, right?

ADAM I think there are songs in it, but they’re embarrassing.

BROOM Honestly, I think that movie managed to solve the problem of how to make a movie with no heart it in it that nonetheless obviously has to have some heart in it. Better than this one. It has heart for, like, two scenes, and it’s not laid on thicker than the movie has earned. Here I felt kind of like, “I don’t really care about the love between Megara and Hercules!” I didn’t really care about anything enough.

BETH But they still had to do it.

ADAM I may be more of a sucker for a pretty-boy face than you are.

BROOM You thought he was pretty?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH But his neck was so big!

ADAM Why do you continue to say that as if you think I don’t respond to that??

BROOM Maybe “face” isn’t the word you meant.

ADAM Well, wait ’til you see Tarzan!

BROOM Yeah, he’s not even wearing armor. You can see everything.

ADAM I’m sure there are some gayboy animators.

BROOM What else are there?

ADAM The Jessica Rabbit ones.

BETH I think there’s more love for the male form in this than there was for the woman.

BROOM She had a reasonable figure.

ADAM She was pretty pointy. She did not have breasts at all.

BETH Yes she did.

ADAM But not really.

BROOM She didn’t have cartoon breasts, she had almost normal-sized breasts. Her nose was no good, though.

BETH Her face was not attractive.

BROOM So, I believe I remember — you can look this up — that the character designs were inspired by or possibly with the participation of Gerald Scarfe, the British caricaturist. [ed.: correct.] And Hades kinda did.

ADAM I liked the gods. You laughed at the cocktail party scene at the beginning.

BETH I did.

ADAM It was good stuff!

BETH The fight scene where the gods were counterattacking was nice to look at, I thought. Some nice colors.

BROOM I thought there were a lot of nice layouts. Pretty things to see. I didn’t think that Hercules was as well animated as the lead ought to be. He would often turn his face to the side and you’d see just his lips and eyelids and it would look really weird.

ADAM When they were doing his goo-goo face. That’s more schtick.

BROOM Basically, a good time, to a low standard of sophistication.

ADAM How does this make you feel in retrospect about Aladdin which had some of these traits in embryo?

BETH I think Aladdin is better. The songs were better integrated.

BROOM Yes. I think the spirit of Aladdin is more of a piece with itself. About the staging — in the opening number, when they’re singing that gospel exposition, and she says that Zeus was “too type A to just relax,” and they form themselves into an A…? To me that was a sign that the animators are not feeling the material.

BETH I thought Aladdin was better than this, and that it felt more lush.

ADAM Well if you are tired of jokey, slick, superficial-ness, I believe the next one is Mulan, which is the opposite of that.

BROOM A very, very serious film. Though if you need comic relief it’s got Eddie Murphy in it as a hip dragon!

ADAM I forgot that. You know, they are sort of oscillating on this, if you will, David Letterman versus Maya Angelou… Those are the only two emotional poles of the nineties.

BETH And they can’t decide which to favor.

BROOM But we’re noting a change here — if we’re talking about what’s happening to the public culture — because like we said, this was different from Aladdin. This was more…

BETH Letterman?

BROOM Well, Adam, you said more Leno than Letterman…

ADAM More Seinfeld less Home Improvement?

BROOM It just cared less, right?

ADAM You can see September 11 being foreshadowed in our callowness.

BETH That’s why the black ladies were done. Because they could be loose about it. They were like, “we’re not PC anymore, see?”

BROOM I don’t think they thought about it. I think they were just showing their true colors there. I mean, if you go to Broadway now you’ll see those black ladies. You’ll see them in every damn show.

ADAM I’m feeling nostalgic for the different era in which we grew up.

BROOM Yeah. It was a more innocent time, “or whatever.”

ADAM When hipsters did not yet really exist.

BROOM Yeah. This was the height of ironic detachment. At least as far as Disney could conceive it. “You’re wearing his merchandise??” That’s it, that’s the full extent of how naughty they could get.

ADAM Yeah: “Air Jordan”… “Air Herc”!!!!

BROOM “The Hercules Store” was like The Disney Store!

ADAM Both a more innocent and more annoying time.

BROOM And it was annoying then. I remember feeling like I was rooting for it but it didn’t quite land.

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM So she disagreed. She really liked it! She can’t see through the lacquer of the late nineties.

BROOM If you didn’t know it was coming, you would be relieved by it, after Pocahontas and Hunchback.

ADAM Are the two-thousands really less phony than the nineties?

BROOM No.

ADAM I mean, that’s the thing. This feels like a sort of dated phoniness, but does it get any better?

BROOM No, it gets worse. It’s gonna get worse.

ADAM I mean in a larger sense. Yes, David Letterman plus Seinfeld plus Monica Lewinsky equals, you know, nothing… but what comes later?

BROOM Surely there was good culture being made in the nineties. What are some references we can use to redeem that era? Is there really nothing lasting from the nineties? “It’s the nineties, mom!”

BETH Pita chips?

ADAM Titanic?

BROOM There must be something that was really moving. Schindler’s List, I think, holds up. I think what was particularly impressive about it was that it did not feel like the era in which it was made.

ADAM Schindler’s List is early nineties.

BETH That counts.

BROOM Anything else? Books?

BETH Infinite Jest?

BROOM But that’s exactly about it, overload of it.

ADAM Salman Rushdie… is exactly glossy and unpleasant in the way I associate with the nineties. And this is not the Salman Rushdie who was in noble exile, but was married to Padma Lakshmi. Who he met on the cover of a magazine. I don’t know, it didn’t feel like this at the time. Because it felt like college.

BROOM We must have seen some good movies in college, right?

ADAM What about Star Wars: Episode One?

BROOM What year was Rushmore? ’98, right?

ADAM But Rushmore isn’t not this!

BROOM I think it’s a turning point. Rushmore is what’s to come. At the time it felt very fresh. It was like, “wow, its reference points are French films of the sixties! Imagine that!”

ADAM Well, that’s what I mean about hipsters. Williamsburg was just a dream in 1997.

BROOM And by the time Royal Tenenbaums came out in 2000, what had seemed so fresh and amazing about Rushmore already seemed like, “huh, he’s really digging in his heels here, isn’t he.” So that was really a dividing line.

BETH Spike Jonze was making some pretty good videos for Björk in the nineties.

ADAM There was probably some really sincere rap in the nineties.

BETH The Beastie Boys were very good in the nineties.

BROOM Can we think of something lasting from between ’93 and ’98?

BETH That Red, White, Blue series.

BROOM I only watched Blue, with Adam, and we made fun of it.

BETH Yeah. Red‘s the only really good one.

ADAM Rent, did you say?

BETH No, but…

ADAM Call it what you will, but Rent was an event, and a very sincere event.

BROOM I think if you returned to it though, you’d drown in the nineties-ness.

ADAM I did return to it, three years ago, when the movie came out. And yeah, of course it’s dated, but at least it’s not repulsive. I’m not ashamed that I loved that as a kid.

BROOM Are you saying that this is repulsive and you’re ashamed that you liked it?

ADAM Rent was not cynical.

BROOM So for you is Aladdin before the era we’re talking about, here?

ADAM In Aladdin you could already see the worm turning, and we saw it. Which I didn’t remember seeing then.

BROOM When I saw Jerry Maguire in 1996, I was deeply moved. And it seems funny to me now that I was so moved by it. Obviously had something to with being in high school, but it might also have had to do with the emotional pitch of the times.

ADAM American Pastoral was in this period. It’s real sincere.

BETH Heavenly Creatures, which I was very impressed with.

ADAM But no-one could say that these were the prevailing cultural flavors of the era.

BETH Well, Seinfeld is, right?

BROOM What other moviegoing experiences stand out to you from high school?

BETH Living in Oblivion. I saw it three times in the theater.

BROOM That made a big impression on me, too.

ADAM Um, Con Air? Was ID4 in this period? Pearl Harbor?

BROOM No, that was 2001.

ADAM I guess the big rebuttal to all this is The Internet.

BROOM I don’t remember what, culturally, was important to me, in those days.

BETH I just had my own thing going on.

ADAM McSweeneys.

BROOM That wasn’t on the scene when we were in high school. ’99, probably, was when we started reading that. That was this new level of ironic remove. It was stuff like this movie that made that exciting – this is “ironic and distanced,” but it’s not, really.

ADAM That’s kid’s irony.

BROOM It’s so easy to stand outside this and comment.

BETH The Real World. It became a reference point in most conversations.

ADAM I didn’t really stand in mainstream popular culture in high school.

BROOM What years was Friends?

ADAM ’93 to 2000? [ed: ’94 to ’04] Friends was the most popular show of the early nineties, and then by the late nineties, Home Improvement and Seinfeld would swap between one and two.

BETH I didn’t realize that Home Improvement was that popular.

ADAM There was actually only one year that Seinfeld was more popular.

BETH It’s a terrible show.

BROOM It’s the Leno to Seinfeld‘s Letterman. It’s the McCain to Seinfeld‘s Obama, if you hear what I’m saying.

BETH I do.

ADAM Are you going to put all this in the transcript?

BROOM I don’t know.

ADAM Some of it is interesting. You could maybe abbreviate it a little bit.

BROOM I’ll cut it down.

[ed.: I did not.]

ADAM That was, like, three-hundred percent. I don’t know if it was good, but it was compelling. I mean, wow.

BETH I agree. I thought it was beautiful. I thought that the illustrations were really lovingly done.

ADAM The computer stuff looked really gorgeous, even though it was totally gratuitous.

BROOM Which computer stuff are you talking about?

BETH Like, the fog and lighting.

ADAM The swooping-over-the-crowd scenes.

BETH Lots of swooping through the bells.

BROOM I know that they were proud of their system for creating crowds with the computer, which was new technology at the time, and I remember being really focussed on the little people in the background when I saw it in the theater. But this time I just took it for granted. I think The Lord of the Rings and things like that have really numbed me to the effect. But I do agree that the CGI was used tastefully.

ADAM To be clear, this was terribly ill-conceived, and I can’t believe this got green-lighted. But it was just so passionate.

BROOM It couldn’t be more misbegotten.

ADAM Just a wrong property to make into a lush animated musical.

BROOM It boggles the mind.

ADAM But it has sort of a really period wrongness. The way that you picture, like — what was the Elizabeth Taylor movie set in ancient Persia?

BROOM Cleopatra?

ADAM Not Cleopatra — she did something, like, even moreso.

BROOM I didn’t even know about that. [ed. I still don’t know.]

ADAM I saw it said in one of her obituaries that “she brought down studios.” And that’s sort of the level of craziness of everything about this.

BETH I can’t imagine a child watching this.

ADAM Where he, like, masturbates into her scarf, and then casts it into hellfire? What’s wrong with that?

BROOM Did he not plunge to his death clutching, like, a giant demon phallus?

ADAM Yeah. I’m sorry — casts it into hellfire while surrounded by a chorus of faceless red-robed monks of death.

BETH A truly scary image.

BROOM I remember thinking that was the best sequence, in 1996, and it totally is.

BETH Oh, it is.

BROOM By a longshot. Because it’s deeply inappropriate for a Disney movie, and they go all-out.

ADAM That’s like what that Leni Riefenstahl scene in The Lion King was trying to be. But wasn’t, because it didn’t have the inappropriate sexual overlay.

BROOM So Beth, you saw Tosca recently. Was he not just like the guy from Tosca?

BETH Oh, he was kind of like the guy from Tosca, yeah. Although I don’t really remember it.

BROOM Now, I don’t know what the plot of the real Hunchback of Notre Dame is. Is there a lustful chief of police? Or whatever he was — what was he?

BETH He was some clergy…

BROOM Ah, but he wasn’t!

ADAM He was a civil official. I think.

BETH But he lived in… ?

ADAM He lived in the Palace of Justice.

BROOM Which was like an anti-church.

ADAM I think he’s like the chief prosecutor and also judge.

BROOM But his song is all about, you know, the fires of hell, and sin, and God, and religious imagery. And he can’t deal with his own sexual impulses because of his hypocritical faith. But he actually has no faith during the rest of the movie, so it was sort of a bait-and-switch.

ADAM No faith except in himself, in his own rectitude.

BROOM Except at the very beginning, when as the jester said, for a moment he feared something bigger than himself. When he sees the eyes of the statues staring at him. So… Quasimodo is the offspring of gypsies?

ADAM He’s a pure gypsy.

BROOM He didn’t have the skin tone.

ADAM He didn’t look like a gypsy, yeah. Because that would have made it… I don’t know, too obvious.

BROOM And what were his parents trying to do?

ADAM Come into the city.

BROOM They weren’t supposed to enter because he was trying to keep gypsies out.

BETH Yes.

ADAM I think the second most effective song is… well, first of all, I think the songs are the least effective thing about this, because they’re so discordant.

BROOM Except for the hellfire song.

ADAM Yes. But I think that God of the Outcasts is a pretty good song…

BETH Really?

ADAM … because the other parishioners are singing, like, “give me wealth.” That woman’s singing “give me love!” and reaching out for it. That sort of pricked my conscience a little bit.

BROOM All right, well, they got you!

BETH With all of the songs, I was just imagining them imagining how it would play on Broadway.

BROOM Or in the Broadway of our minds.

ADAM Well, that’s over. This is the last one that’s like that, I think. The next one’s Tarzan, right?

BROOM Hercules.

ADAM Oh, all right, but Hercules is not Broadway, it’s moving into pop-y. This is really the last one that feels like, you know, Neil Patrick Harris would be doing the whole thing.

BETH Yeah, it’s so much that, though. They really went all the way.

BROOM They were trying to do an epic melodrama. This is their, like, Sweeney Todd, you know? I mean, it was their Les Misérables, to be more on point.

ADAM I mean, it was good. I liked it!

BROOM I can’t summon the word “good.” I don’t think I can say that.

ADAM Yeah, it wasn’t “good,” it was… memorable.

BETH It was compelling. My barometer is how frequently I look at the clock to see how much time has passed, and I wasn’t doing it very much.

BROOM I felt its length weighing on me in the second half. Several times. It definitely had flair… but let’s just talk about some things that were bad about it, because I feel like it needs to be pointed out that it was bad. The presence of the gargoyles at all, and then especially the song that they do: embarrassing.

ADAM Isn’t it good that they get his hopes up, then to be cruelly dashed? I mean, that’s the thing: he really is terribly ugly, and the movie doesn’t really pull that punch.

BROOM You’re saying that… he can’t ever find love? I really don’t know what the point of the original story is.

ADAM No, me neither.

BETH It doesn’t matter!

ADAM We can leave that by the side of the road. This is a self-contained artifact. It’s stands with Demi Moore’s The Scarlet Letter.

BROOM It really does, actually. They’re of a piece and they’re from the same era. I was thinking of that when she was up there at the stake.

BETH Her eye color was bizarre.

BROOM She was very poorly animated compared to the rest of it, I thought, and that actually affected my experience. I couldn’t take her character seriously. I thought it was interesting that her sexy dance was done with weird shading effects on her body.

BETH I really didn’t notice that.

BROOM Her dress, when she was dancing and igniting the fires of lust in Frollo’s loins, was animated with a different technique; it looked like a continuous special effect. To signify its mysterious power over him, I guess.

ADAM We’ve already seen… what’s his name? Prebus?

BROOM Phoebus.

ADAM We’ve already seen his exact facial features somewhere else.

BROOM No, you’ve seen them in Tangled, but we haven’t yet.

ADAM Oh, I was going to say, the first third of this totally is Tangled, but they do a much better job there. You’re going to see this again twenty years later, and it’s going to be better.

BROOM I thought that the conception of some of the songs was wishful thinking. I was just working on a job where people were trying to work out the dramaturgical mechanisms of songs in a show to make it work, and I felt like we were just watching that kind of thing play out, here. It was the sort of stuff where I try to keep in mind someone like you, Adam, who thinks this stuff is embarrassing, and always to remind myself that this sort of thing doesn’t actually work. Like the opening number: we were all snickering at it because it was so contrived. Here’s the sound of bells! — now we swoop down into Paris! — now there’s a jester and he’s got puppets of all the characters and he’s saying “don’t you want to know how the story began, well I’ll tell you!” — and then there’s a flashback narrated in song!…

ADAM That’s exactly how Aladdin starts.

BROOM There it’s just a jokey frame. It’s like: “Who am I? Who knows! Who cares? Now the story starts!” Here it was actual important exposition, and he has some kind of jester attitude, who knows what it was…

BETH That confused me, so I was just picturing an eight-year-old having no idea what was going on.

BROOM But by the end of it, when Adam said, “did you follow that?” and you said “I think I did” — it was from the visuals, and I think an eight-year-old would understand that the mommy died and that this guy’s bad, and yet for some reason he’s keeping the kid alive, and the kid grows up to be “Quasi”!

ADAM “Hey, Quasi!” Yeah, those gargoyles.

BROOM Named “Victor,” “Hugo,” and “Laverne.” I mean, that’s funny! But only as an “obviously we won’t actually put that in the movie” kind of joke.

ADAM Played respectively by Niles Frasier…

BROOM No, it wasn’t. It was the guy from Murphy Brown, Charles Kimbrough.

ADAM Oh, of course! Blast from the nineties.

BROOM And George Costanza, of course. And the other woman I didn’t know.

ADAM Woman? Laverne was a woman? That whole time?

BETH Yes.

ADAM I thought that was just a lot of drag going on. I thought it was just a crotchety old dude, like a Hal Holbrook type.

BROOM It did seem like that, but it wasn’t. But their song was so, so embarrassing to me. You didn’t feel that way?

ADAM It was the same thing as always. It was Be Our Guest. I mean, whatever. All this is — it’s like playing “Memory,” you know? There’s only so many elements; they just reuse them in different ways.

BROOM But if they have the vision to put in a song about “hellfire!,” couldn’t they also have taken the leap and said, “hey, I don’t think this one needs sidekicks.”

BETH Well, I think it did — Quasimodo needed someone to talk to.

BROOM He needs to talk when he’s alone, yes. But he had those dolls! Those would have been more appropriate.

ADAM Can you imagine how psychologically disturbing this would have been if he’d had no sidekicks? It would have just been him going crazy up in the tower!

BETH Or if he’d been talking to dolls that didn’t talk back.

BROOM We would feel his loneliness with him! It would actually be very affecting. Remember in The Lord of the Rings when Gollum talks to himself in the puddle of water?

ADAM Or he could have been talking to Wilson.

BETH It would have been incredibly creepy, though!

BROOM This movie was creepy!

BETH It was, it was, but think how much more creepy it would have been…

BROOM If it had just been Wilson?

ADAM I thought it was really effective! And it had the atmospherics of, like — you said “Les Mis,” or “Phantom,” or “Robin Hood.” I wish there had been a little more pomp and mystery about the Cave of Wonders… the Court of… whatever.

BROOM Yeah. It basically turned out to be some assholes in a sewer. And we’re supposed to think of them as the good guys, but they were about to hang our heroes too. I mean, Frollo is more or less right: the world doesn’t accept him. I thought it was interesting, the philosophical balance they struck between “it’s a lie: if he goes out he will find acceptance” and “no, it’s not a lie: people really are cruel.” Because people are cruel! But not wholly cruel. It’s an interesting moral.

BETH Mm-hm.

BROOM But I just don’t go for that atmosphere you were talking about. It’s the same reason I don’t like Batman movies: you can’t tell me that it’s epic, just for the sake of its being epic.

ADAM It also feels very nineties, in terms of being a movie about cultural moralism, and outcasts. It wasn’t so much a movie about gays, although I guess you could claim that if you wanted; it felt more like a movie about illegal immigrants. It felt resonant to contemporary political problems.

BROOM It would be very easy to claim that it’s about coming out of the closet. Come on!

ADAM I know, but I don’t want to be a stereotype of myself.

BROOM You squeezed it out when it’s not there; here it’s actually easy.

ADAM It was about gays coupling with illegal immigrants to create a united front against the religious right. It does feel like a Lewinsky era movie, though.

BROOM The reason that the hellfire scene was the best was because it had mystery and atmosphere and didn’t fully explain itself; it just showed us imagery that was effective. The rest of it was very diagrammatic.

ADAM And that scene set up a very compelling reason why he’s being such a fanatic. The villain in Pocahontas is just a fanatic because he’s kind of a douchebag. There’s nothing really compelling about that. You really believe that this guy would burn down the whole city to find her. And every time you saw his face, with that glittering digust/lust….

BROOM It was an interestingly-designed character.

BETH I actually really liked his face. I thought it was well done.

BROOM They didn’t make him look like a cartoon of evil; they just made him look like some actor who might play that guy.

BETH Who did he look like? I felt like he actually looked like a guy, like a real actor.

BROOM Unlike Esmeralda, who just looked like big eyes.

BETH She looked a little bit like a darker Demi Moore. Her chin was sort of square in the same way.

BROOM A little, but I thought it was pretty lazy.

ADAM Quasimodo was really ugly, in a way that was hard to wave away.

BETH I feel like they tried to make him a little bit cute at the same time.

BROOM I thought they did pretty good job of solving that. He was sort of the E.T. type of ugly-cute. With the eyes spread out and a flattened head.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM Here’s my big point. I always have to have one, and this is it: Broadway-style storytelling is useful on Broadway because it’s up on a stage far away; they need to shout everything at you to get it to the back of the house, and you can’t see any detail. So it’s very demonstrative and telegraphs everything. But in animation, you can bring people into… a cave of wonders! So to have everything be shouted, essentially…

ADAM Ahhhh ahhhh ahhhh!…. [imitating grandiose choral voices]

BROOM I meant metaphorically shouted, but yes, that too, to have a giant chorus singing the intro and ending of every song… it’s a waste! It’s a misuse of the medium.

BETH Will they figure this out? Is that what you’re saying? This is the last one and they stop being this way?

BROOM They go in other directions, but I don’t think they figure out what I’m saying. I’m saying the old movies had their own movie-rhythm and movie-feel. But look: yes, a well-crafted one of these, given that they should never have done it in the first place.

ADAM And I think it was probably a big flop, right?

BROOM I mean… it’s such a mess!

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM Sure, it is very derivative, but having seen thirty-four of these… even the ones in the so-called Golden Age seemed derivative, you know? So that doesn’t strike me as all that surprising. It’s just part of the loving pattern of the thing.

BROOM I think there’s a difference between “consistent” or “of a piece” and “derivative.”

ADAM This is a little more obviously or aggressively derivative than the others, and I guess that stood out to Janet Maslin.

BROOM When she said that each song these days seems to serve functions laid out by prior songs, that’s the essence of it, to me. It’s not that I want to see something that I’ve never seen before; it’s that it feels like this is happening because it’s the formula. I’ve been saying that for ten years’ worth of these movies, now.

ADAM I mean, they’re all the same story, about someone being kept behind walls and wanting to break out into the wide world.

BROOM That’s what they’re all about now, but they used to be about all kinds of things. You know… a fox and a hound… Robin Hood… a bunch of mice rescuing a little girl… mice rescuing a little boy…

ADAM … Donald Duck going to South America…

BROOM … Donald Duck going to South America again… Almost none of them was about someone wishing for the fresh air. What’s the first one that’s like that?

BETH Snow White.

BROOM No! She’s happy in living in her palace. She has a lovely life; she just wants someone to love her.

ADAM Cinderella is kind of like that.

BROOM Cinderella is the first one. Unless you count Pinocchio, but his desire is different. He just wants to grow up.

ADAM That’s similar. I don’t think it’s orders of magnitude different.

BETH I would count Pinocchio.

BROOM But it’s a morality play. When you go out into the world, you better watch out for the tempters.

ADAM This was sort of like that, too.

BROOM No it wasn’t.

ADAM The world is a dangerous place for him, and he learns to overcome it, just as Pinocchio does.

BROOM Is that really what happens in this movie?

ADAM Bambi is not that movie. And The Lion King is not exactly that. Well, I guess in The Lion King he does want to explore the elephant graveyard.

BROOM I don’t think that’s the theme there.

ADAM It is, a little bit. He does want adventure, and then it’s thrust upon him in Hamlet fashion.

BROOM But the arc of The Lion King is that he has this fate put on his shoulders and he has to decide to accept that responsibility.

ADAM It’s actually about coming back home.

BROOM It has the “leave me alone!” scene that recurred in this one. When Quasimodo is chained up and the gargoyles say “come on, get out there!” and he says “Leave me alone.” I thought, this is something we’ve seen frequently.

ADAM We saw that with the genie in Aladdin also.

BROOM I guess the Beast gets that way too. Belle never does. Women don’t go through that kind of thing. But all the male heroes, of late…

ADAM … have a sulky interlude.

BROOM I would call it the “leave me alone” scene. “JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!”

ADAM Well. That might be the worst one.

BETH It’s hard. I still think Fox and the Hound was worse.

BROOM This at least had production values in its favor. Fox and the Hound seemed shoddy even on that level. Not to say that this didn’t also have dubious choices in the visual department. But it looked like something. Fox and the Hound looked chintzy most of the time.

ADAM Four movies ago we were so excited that this breath of fresh Broadway air was being blown into the Disney musical, and now they’ve already exhausted that possibility, such that we are going to have to shift into ‘tude and snark as the next mode.

BROOM They had already started shifting within this movie. The totally gratuitous forest animal characters were not actually characterized this time around. They were just ‘tude.

ADAM But that’s in all of them, that’s not snark.

BROOM Can you say any word to characterize Flit the hummingbird? What would you say is Flit’s salient personality trait?

ADAM Didn’t the little mermaid have a fish friend, who did nothing but get into trouble with the shark?

BROOM Yeah, Flounder. He was an enthusiastic buddy character who was a little childlike, looked up to her. She had charisma that was cool to him.

ADAM I don’t think that these characters were that different. The raccoon would not have ever said “Cowabunga.”

BROOM That’s only one variety of ‘tude.

ADAM This was just so formulaic. It was kind of awesome at points, actually, just how super-Broadway it was.

BETH The tree-chopping number, what was that called?

BROOM “Mine Mine Mine.”

BETH That was so over the top Broadway, it was so choreographed and…

BROOM Gay.

BETH Yes, but not even that. Just the lavishness of that crazy number.

ADAM Whenever you have a song cross-cutting between two different characters expressing two different things…

BROOM The supposed parallel between the two halves made absolutely no sense in that song. They just decided it was going to be “one of those.”

ADAM I think that when they did “Savages” and “Colors of the Wind,” they were high on their visual daring. I think they thought they were Mary Blair, totally paving new ground. I think they were like, “this is some sophisticated shit that we’re doing here!”

BROOM I think they thought they were unearthing the beautiful paving of old ground. I thought they thought “we are doing Sleeping Beauty for the first time in two generations. No-one has really done this in years.” And you know, it’s true! It’s too bad this movie sucked ass, because that is a thing worth digging back out. But it never felt sensible.

ADAM Everyone say what you thought was the thing that made it terrible, beyond merely just dull.

BROOM For me what made it was terrible was the intensity of a complaint that I’ve made about previous movies, about The Lion King: that they were doing it all just because they knew that these were things you’re supposed to do, but that they did not understand the reasoning behind any of it.

ADAM The complete insincerity.

BROOM It’s based on a fervent superficial understanding of prior Disney movies, which makes it feel… gay, for want of a better word. It’s fetishistic. Whatever it means to them doesn’t directly have to do with what it’s actually supposed to “mean.”

BETH Mine is sort of related to that: they didn’t seem to think about who would be watching this. Does this appeal to kids at all? It’s a love story! As a kid, I never cared about the love story part of stories, and it was all a love story. And then it was war-ish. I just don’t feel like they were thinking about how it was playing to the intended audience.

ADAM I find this exceptionally offensive because it’s about a really lurid and tragic period in American history. It’s like if you did a Romeo and Juliet with, like, a slave daughter and a plantation owner’s son.

BROOM Or a Jew and a Nazi.

ADAM Yeah, kind of! I mean, it’s wonderful that she makes this peace between them, but of course they’re all going to die in three years from smallpox. To take a nominally historical subject and make it into just cannon-fodder for your schmaltzy story… was terrible.

BROOM But, to go back to what I said about Lion King, what’s offensive is that they on some level agree that it would be irresponsible to just do that, so they start making a show of caring about “showing proper respect.”

ADAM Well, the PC-ness of it was also bad.

BETH That was just the 90s, though.

BROOM But you can get away with this tasteless, tasteless thing if the reasoning is just, “this is going to be a good story; I know we can sell this, guys.” What’s offensive here is that the message of the movie is to paint with all the colors of the wind, like the Native Americans did, and talk to the trees, like the Native Americans did.

ADAM Do you remember the ill-fated sitcom… I think it was “All-American Girl” with Margaret Cho, in the late 90s? And the producers were super-excited that it was the first sitcom about an Asian-American family, but then it fell apart in part because Asian-American groups denounced it, because one of the actors was Japanese, and one was Korean, and they spoke in like a mish-mash language. It was all just “Asian.” Here it was just a total pastiche of every cliche image of Native Americans that anyone could think of. Combined with a reverent sort of “…guys, the environment!…”

BROOM Let’s talk about why Avatar was better than this.

ADAM Because it wasn’t set in colonial Virginia; it was set in fantasy space. And it was even more luridly colorful.

BROOM I daresay that the main reason Avatar was better was because it was actually selling this totally hackneyed cheeseball formula story. And this never sold it. It never believed in any of the elements that needed to make it work. We didn’t believe that the characters loved each other; we didn’t believe that they were characters.

ADAM They had no personalities.

BROOM Especially him. She at least sang a song about the riverbend, which is weak but it’s something. He had nothing. He had nothing going for him. He didn’t look good, either.

BETH I beg to disagree. No, I don’t.

ADAM Even I don’t think he was hot.

BETH No, he was not hot. But she was so hot that it was like they didn’t know how to handle all the angles of her face. Sometimes she looked like a block.

BROOM Once again, the disproportionate expertise at drawing her ass and her breasts was inappropriate. They should hire people who have not practiced that as much. She was the best-drawn animation in the movie.

BETH Physically. Body-wise. But her face I had problems with.

BROOM Well, even her face was the best in the movie, because the rest of the faces… The animation was at once slick and polished, and also wrong. I felt like it was the CalArts class of 1992, and they’ve all been taught this and read books about “how to animate in the Disney style,” and it looks like phony crap.

ADAM And the villain, Captain Ratcliffe, was like weak tea. He was no Ursula, or Jafar, or Scar.

BETH He wasn’t even really a villain.

ADAM Yeah, he was just nothin’. And his just desserts are, like, a dry scone.

BROOM Because what are the desserts? Like you were saying, the whole story is distasteful: Are the white invaders demons who must be killed or else the natives are going to lose everything that they care about? Yes. This is true. Are they all likely to shoot the savages rather than talk to them? Yes. So it’s not just this one guy who’s the villain. He represents the beliefs of his entire culture; this is what he was sent to do. The amount of trickery that he actually resorts to is minimal, if any. As he says at the end, “I couldn’t have planned it better!” Because of course, he didn’t plan it. He doesn’t do anything devious. It makes no sense at all for there to be this preening “bad guy” character.

ADAM And it would have been better if they’d killed them. If the Native Americans had had a policy of no surrender, fighting every white person, they might have had a fighting chance of not all getting exterminated.

BETH A very irresponsible movie.

BROOM The songs are very bad. The lyrics are very bad.

BETH Yes, and thought they were clever, which made it worse.

BROOM Yes, that’s Stephen Schwartz trying to show that he’s a pro. Alan Menken dug Disney out of the hole of the 80s with Little Mermaid, so they obviously feel very indebted to him, and they’re going to keep hiring him, but I think here we see that he has his limitations. He couldn’t figure out what to do. “Okay, the Englishmen are going to sing an Englishmen’s sailing song at the beginning… go.” And look what he came up with.

ADAM Which was the same as the Dane’s sailing song at the beginning of The Little Mermaid.

BROOM But that song was actually charming on some level. This was like the squarest…

BETH I felt like they knew it, because they were muffling it. You couldn’t actually hear the words except for “Virginia” at the end.

BROOM I think it was badly music-directed. A lot of the recordings were not well done; a lot of the singing was not good.

BETH Did Mel Gibson do his own singing? It sounded like it. [ed.: It seems he did.]

BROOM You said the orchestration of “Colors of the Wind,” which was supposed to be so spectacular, was disappointing to you.

BETH It was jumbly. I thought it was being ostentatious and getting in the way of the song communicating. It just sounded weird to me; I kept noticing it.

BROOM In all the arrangements, you felt the strain of them trying to express some kind of sweep, and they couldn’t get there.

ADAM WhoooSH! I can’t make the sound of an orchestra, but, like, that harp sound.

BROOM When I think from an editorial point of view, I think that wanting to get sweep across in a love story — all the effects they wanted to achieve — they’re not impossible things, and when they work, they’re worth doing. It’s just an issue of craft. Resorting to the damn swirling leaves on the wind every time you want to show that something is magical and stirring is weak. It shows that you don’t know what you’re doing.

ADAM You should see The New World, the Terence Malick movie, because it’s about the same subject, the grandeur and mystery of two cultures meeting, but it’s a good movie, in part because it’s really spare. Whereas here to convey this grandeur they had to make more waterfalls… you know, more cowbell. I had that in the back of my mind as I was watching this, and the tastelessness of this was exacerbated by that contrast.

BETH I think the only actual character in this movie was the tree. The only fully-realized thing.

BROOM Full realized as a fairy godmother; she wasn’t anything more than that.

ADAM But at least she was something.

BETH I was just thinking, if I were a kid, what part would be my favorite part? What part would I look forward to if someone put this on in school, or something? It would be the tree part. And that would be it. Or the colors at the end, because it was kind of visually interesting.

BROOM My favorite would be the parts that had visual flair. “Colors of the Wind,” which was supposed to be like an animation spectacular… you know, sure, it was.

ADAM I liked the friend.

BROOM Oh yeah, she’s a real character.

BETH That’s true, she was real.

ADAM The real Pocahontas, incidentally, did go to London. And they sort of paraded her around court, and then she died there a couple years later.

BROOM She probably wasn’t as beautiful.

ADAM No, I don’t think she was. Probably because she was a fourteen-year-old girl. And John Smith was in his forties.

BROOM So with that in mind, how could this movie possibly have happened, really? They were like, “what should we make a movie about?” and they have a bunch of things on the wall. You know, “Treasure Island… Robinson Crusoe…”

BETH Don’t you think it was that they could make a really hot character? “I really wanna draw this woman.” I think that has something to do with it.

ADAM I think they just wanted to have some sort of non-white heroine. Mulan‘s coming up.

BROOM Powerful. Female. Minority.

ADAM “Betsy Ross! Oh, no, wait.”

BROOM And because this movie so deeply doesn’t work, because this story doesn’t actually lend itself, it’s so transparent that that’s the only reason this movie exists. And that’s embarrassing!

ADAM I really think Sacagawea would be a cool story. At least that at least has a sort of adventure plot.

BROOM She actually has to be good at something.

ADAM Sacagawea was my favorite of the Value Tales. She was like the “Value of Adventure” or something. It’s not as much just a nubile Indian princess who locks eyes with the white man. She has to win Lewis and Clark’s respect through her canny tracking.

BETH This was just so dull! Even in the beginning, when the ship was going through the storm, I found my mind wandering.

ADAM I know! My mind just went blank!

BETH I found myself thinking about something else, and I was like, “wait a second! wait a second!”

ADAM I had the same experience! Because they were just doing a storm, and I was like, “oh, storm storm storm storm storm.”

BROOM Before the title, we’re subjected to a guy falling overboard and then John Smith saves him, which was supposed to be the characterization scene for John Smith, which is such a mistake. And those of you reading at home should know that at that point, Adam, or Beth, I can’t remember which one of you said it, asked “can we start talking over this movie?” It was already obviously bad, thirty seconds in. I mean, it was bad one second in, because they were singing what may have been the worst song in the movie. And that’s sayin’ something.

ADAM And Thomas, who I think was supposed to be poignant, because he’s trying to be loyal to John Smith but then he kills the guy, which could be interesting, but he’s just nothin’. He even looks like a nothin’.

BROOM He looked worse than Johnny Appleseed. Okay, here’s what we haven’t directly talked about: the art direction, which seemed to be the one thing in this movie that seemed to have some passion behind it…

BETH Yes, there was passion behind it.

BROOM So what did we think of it, though?

ADAM Garish and unpleasant to look at.

BROOM I thought the Mary Blair-isms, at least in this desert, were pleasant.

BETH Yes, occasionally there would just be a nice picture on the screen. At the end when they were about to kill them, it wasn’t necessarily well done but it was still interesting.

ADAM But why did everything have to be, like, pink and orange and electric blue, through the whole movie?

BROOM I think they were watching Fantasia and were like, “we work at Disney! We’re the ones to do this, now!”

BETH And I guess they thought it would work with the story because they’re in this new world.

ADAM Because of the colors of the wind.

BETH Exactly.

BROOM The songs in this were exactly self-parody.

[we then watch the Just Around the Riverbend sing-along feature and mock the song. Then we move on to the Colors of the Wind sing-along…]

ADAM Why do Broadway songs always sound like they have too many notes in them? They go up and down too much.

BROOM Because they think about story, and then they think about lyrics, and then they think about setting them, and that’s the wrong order for making a song catchy.

[Pocahontas sings “How can there be so much that you don’t know?”]

ADAM See, like why is this going up and down??

BROOM Because there’s too many words! If you just starting making up a melody, it would probably only have room for a couple of syllables in it. When you decide that you’re going to set “My name is Pocahontas and I’m an Indian princess,” then you have to go, yeah, up and down, all over the place, to fill out the time.

[We continue to heckle Colors of the Wind]

BROOM All the times in this movie where someone goes “whoa!” because magic is whirling around them, like when Cinderella gets her dress — which is the original of that image — that’s some seriously wussy fantasy, right?

BETH Whose fantasy is that, really?

BROOM It’s people who listen to music from Japanese role-playing games in orchestral arrangements. That’s a type of person. Hair blowing in the wind is really meaningful to them, somehow. And this movie felt like it had been made by them. And those are people who don’t understand people.

(we read the New York Times review)

BETH She started out saying that it was great and then backpedaled.

BROOM I think she wanted to say that it was great for some reason, possibly political, and then had to admit that many aspects of it were not. But she was overall more willing to go with this movie than we were. And I remember thinking it was terrible when I saw it originally.

ADAM This is not even the best movie about Native Americans made in the early 1990s. I mean, Dances With Wolves made me cry as a kid, over and over.

BROOM Kevin Costner would have been a better John Smith.

ADAM Between Dances With Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, I had such a crush on Kevin Costner.

(then we watch the Siskel and Ebert review)

BETH Blah blah blah, 90s.

BROOM Is Gene Siskel’s serious reaction there telling us that we need to remember that even though to our eyes now, this might seem like an infantile form of liberal guilt, we all were that infantile a mere fifteen years ago?

BETH Yes. I think so. I don’t know why everyone started being more aware of this in the 90s, but it was trendy.

ADAM Bill Clinton.

BETH And honestly, I think, “The Real World.” The show. I’m serious.

BROOM Explain.

BETH It was bringing diversity to young people. It was exposing the prejudices of the people in the house and making young viewers think about them. It had, like, a black woman who was a rapper from a poor neighborhood, and then in season two or three there was a guy with AIDs. It was consciously trying to be “diverse”…

BROOM Maybe this was your route to being made aware of this sort of thing.

BETH Yeah, it was, but I watched TV all the time.

BROOM And that was the first time that hit you.

BETH Yes.

BROOM This is a reminder to myself to look up whether “This is what you get when races are diverse” really was a lyric in this movie.

[ed. Yes. But on the soundtrack album the lyric is, reportedly, “Their whole disgusting race is like a curse,” which makes more sense. This was one of a couple of lyrics rewritten shortly before the movie was released, apparently because they had “tested” as too offensive.]

ADAM I feel like the 90s is when diversity became, like, “official.” Obviously there was consciousness of race and diversity in the 70s and 80s, but it was kind of a liberal thing, whereas I feel like in the 90s everyone capitulated and it became sort of state religion.

BROOM When did the phrase “political correctness” come into being?

ADAM 1991, I want to say. [ed.: more complicated than that] That was the time of the speech codes, and, like… Leonard Jeffries, this professor at CUNY who taught that white people are evil… I don’t know where the actual term “political correctness” stems from, but it was fresh enough in 1993 that Bill Maher thought it would be a funny title for his show.

BROOM Yes, exactly, it was still recent and live at the time of this movie.

ADAM I had this book called “The Politically Correct Handbook” that came out in 1993 that was just absurd politically correct terminology for various things, but it felt funny in 1993.

BROOM I remember “Politically Correct Fairy Tales” around the same time.

ADAM Right. I don’t know why that stuff seemed so funny then.

BROOM But having your eyes opened to the fact that “the story you were told in school was one-sided, man!” — that goes back much further. That was happening in the 60s… it was happening on an intellectual level for decades before that.

ADAM Yes, this is a fifty-year trend here, but it does feel — maybe it’s just because of when I was growing up — this feels like an inflection from the early 90s, but maybe that’s because that was also when I first became politically aware.

BROOM It definitely hit the mass culture in a big way at that point. Was it that it was seen as marketable, or did it just make people feel good about themselves to be peddling it? Did Disney do this because it made them feel good about themselves, or was there some kind of calculation behind it, like, “this is what sells now.”

ADAM Probably both.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM It’s strange stuff. And look at the reactionary price we’re paying for it now.

ADAM Yeah, although everyone understands that the Tea Party people, and the “birthers,” are all crazy wackos.

BETH Well, obviously not everyone understands! How did they all get elected, then?

BROOM No-one understands! The point is, they are the extremists, but a big chunk of the population considers them “not that crazy.” And the reason they feel that sympathy is because of terrible movies like this. This is the reason that Sarah Palin is a figure in our cultural life.

BETH Oh, I bet she likes this movie. It’s about a strong woman in the wilderness.

BROOM No! You know what people would say when they saw this: “Oh, of course, the white people are bad.”

ADAM I was going to make a joke and say that this movie is what turned [mutual friend] into a conservative, but that’s not such a joke. He started out as sort of a modern Democrat, but he loved to harp on this movie. It is true that [mutual friends’] umbrage at Liberal-dom is this feeling that the thumb of oppressive mediocrity is pressing down on us. This idea that “the grown-ups are telling you what to think.”

BROOM Oh, but they love grown-ups. They love really grown up grown-ups. Their horror is that actually grown-upness has been replaced with some kind of inane tea-sipping guilt-trip.

ADAM Pablum. Yeah.

BROOM This is like the ladies’ book club of self-flagellation, and that’s what they hate. That all of the real men who really know what’s going on are being told that they don’t feel bad enough about slavery. And that’s a totally sympathetic perspective, if it were actually how things work, but I think it’s mostly a straw man, one that persists because of movies like this, because of what went on in the mass culture. It’s in the popular imagination, and yes, that does affect elections, but it shouldn’t. But it does. Did people vote for Obama because he was black and it made them feel good about themselves to vote for a black guy?

ADAM I sure did!

BROOM Probably, yes. But they also did it because all those people for whom that is true and could totally be held against them also sympathized with his policies. This idea that things happen solely because of bullshit is only true in the forum of Disney movies. I believe. Well, maybe not only.

ADAM Well, after you turn off the recording I will talk more about why I voted for Obama, but I don’t want that to be on the internet.