ADAM That was as dated as any movie we’ve seen in the whole run. That was just a great big wallop of 90s, in a way that is distressing to me.

BROOM I’d be interested to hear you say what about it was 90s, because on the surface this is a story about animals, epic themes, Hamlet…

BETH Fathers and sons, self-discovery…

ADAM It had some of the moral self-congratulation that I think of as characteristic of the early 90s. I made a joke at the beginning about how seeing the baboon greet Mufasa was like seeing Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton together. That’s obviously a silly joke, but at the same time… It had that portentous, vaguely environmentalist, vaguely multi-culturalist, heaping political correctness.

BETH It was excited about how politically correct it was being.

BROOM Wasn’t it also excited about how… some vaguer thing… it was being? — as characterized by, like, the drumbeat and the title concurring at the beginning, and at the end? “Boom! The Lion King!” That’s some kind of self-satisfaction that doesn’t have to do with any content, but it’s still… if you could tell me why that was 90s, I would think that was fascinating, because I would believe it, but I don’t know exactly why.

ADAM You agree with me, Beth, right?

BETH Yeah, it’s very 90s.

BROOM I think we need to know what the sins of the 90s were.

ADAM Let’s see if we can catalog. First of all, the songs were very 90s. They did not have the synthesizery goodness of the 80s stuff. They had this operatic grandiosity.

BETH World beat.

ADAM If you had told me that Celine Dion had covered “Can You Feel The Love Tonight,” I would not have been surprised.

BROOM I think these songs are terrible. It’s not because I have a concept of what era they belong to. They’re just lazy. For the viewers at home: we watched an illicit online version that happened to have captions only for the songs, so we saw all the song lyrics onscreen. And that really clarified for me how bad the song lyrics are: really bad.

BETH The rhythm made no sense in most of the songs.

BROOM The number of times that there were “puns” — and I use the word wincingly…

ADAM The worst song was of course the baboon’s nonsense song.

BROOM “Squash banahna?” No, I think the worst song is “Be Prepared.”

ADAM “Be Prepared” is the best song!

BROOM “Our teeth and ambitions are bared / Be Prepared”?

BETH “Be Prepared” was the best song because it had some catchiness.

BROOM Oh good god! I am surprised. I will differ with you on this one.

BETH Go ahead. All the songs were terrible. But I thought that one at least had some spirit, I guess.

BROOM You agree with that, Adam?

ADAM The only thing that was legitimately exuberant about this, as opposed to fake exuberant, was anything with Jeremy Irons in it.

BETH That’s right. I think it’s because Jeremy Irons was singing that song. That’s the only reason it came off as palatable.

BROOM I remember finding it very embarrassing then. And just thinking of it as failed, now.

BETH I thought everything that was happening during that song was embarrassing, visually.

ADAM With the Leni Riefenstahl shout-out?

BROOM Honestly, I thought that it looked like they had produced and produced and produced to try to squeeze some something out of the stone of that worthless song with worthless lyrics.

ADAM You commented, when we watched Aladdin, that Jafar was basically Jeremy Irons-ish, and then they just decided to go ahead and get Jeremy Irons. It was great. He’s great.

BROOM “You’re weird / You have no idea” is the high point of the movie. [ed: only upon reading the Times review later in this session do we all learn that this is a lift from Reversal of Fortune.] And probably the high point of their villains from now on. That’s gonna be it. I don’t think they have any more mincing villains after this.

BETH Really?

ADAM There’s the weird, prudish priest in Hunchback.

BROOM That’s right, but he’s more like the guy from “Tosca.” Scarpia.

ADAM I don’t mean to give anything away, but the villain in Tangled is pretty satisfying. But that’s gonna be, like, six years from now.

BROOM Well, this was our longest gap yet, and watching one of these movies after a long gap, I was aware, for the first time in a while in this series, of just how lush a thing a Disney animated movie is. There’s so much color and life to it, even when it’s not satisfying or good. I understand why kids watch The Lion King all the time: you can really go there, and it surrounds you with stuff.

ADAM It does have the effect of going into Photoshop and turning up the saturation all the way.

BETH I liked a lot of the nature long shots, like trees silhouetted against the dusk. Things like that. But the movie…! It was slow, too.

BROOM I think the movie is all screwed up, and I can characterize it. It occurred to me in the sequence when Rifiki, the monkey, says “I know da way! Follow me!” and he goes into a tangled maze. And it’s just at the point of the story where Simba’s in this pit of self-pity, and so he goes on, oh, guess what!, a voyage of self-discovery, symbolized by a quest through a maze. A tangled spiritual cave into which he has to journey to encounter himself. It was so schematically that. It’s like when writers say they read Joseph Campbell to learn how myths work, what the basic stories are: “The hero has to go on a journey of self-discovery!” It ends up feeling so calculated. Yes, it’s exactly the right thing to have in a movie like this, but they didn’t do it intuitively. Those things recur in stories because they have some intuitive meaning to the people telling the stories. Here it felt like all that stuff was just happening because it had been calculated and read about, and they knew they were supposed to do it. The reason those things are meaningful in Bambi and other movies is…

ADAM Because they come from the subconscious.

BROOM Because they have the quality of having come from the subconscious. Which means not a lot of dialogue with puns, and not a lot of music constantly explaining the significance of every moment, which is a holdover from the Broadway aesthetic that was brought in with Beauty and the Beast. It felt like it was saying “Now we’re going on the mythic journey!!” None of it felt truly mystical, which animation totally has the capacity to do. I felt like if they had just turned down the music and had the characters shut up for a while, the part where his father appears to him in the clouds… it might be laughable now, but there’s a concept there; they almost get it. If it just had cooled off and let us feel that we were watching a dream, I felt like the movie would have had so much more to offer. But it never did. That is my objection.

ADAM Other things that were extremely 90s: if you knew that there was a movie that featured the voice talents of James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and Matthew Broderick… could it get any better?

BETH That hyena looked like Whoopi Goldberg.

BROOM It did. And the other hyena?

BETH … Danny DeVito?

ADAM Cheech Marin.

BROOM Why do you think he said “Que pasa” for no reason at all?

ADAM It felt like the film version of a Maya Angelou poem.

BROOM It felt like the inaugural animated movie.

ADAM That’s what I mean by portentous, like: “A Rock, A River, A Tree.” That’s an actual quote. That is from the inaugural poem. “A Rock, A River, A Tree / Hosts to species long since departed.”

BROOM From which year?

ADAM From the Clinton administration, from the 1993 presidential inauguration.

BROOM So this movie was already underway at the time; it synchronizes with that.

ADAM But it was very much in the zeitgeist, this, like, “Africa is a home of wonder and moral gravity.” That’s very early 90s.

BROOM The other night in bed, I was singing to myself, in my head, some songs from Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” 1986, and thinking, “those are really thoughtful songs, and you can say that he was being a cultural pirate and stealing this stuff, but it’s also aesthetically thoughtful in its own right, and I like it.” That’s 1986, and then by eight years later, that has congealed into… this.

ADAM Think about the difference between this movie and The Jungle Book in terms of the portrayal of basically the same kind of story.

BROOM The same everything. Well, there’s no father in The Jungle Book, which is crucial. But yes.

ADAM Baloo and Timon-and-Pumbaa are the same character.

BROOM Half of the elements are the same. They go to the same elephants’ graveyard.

BETH But this was so much less fun!

ADAM We had, in college, a special awards ceremony — we had a fake graduation where they gave a special degree to Nelson Mandela — do you remember this?

BROOM I remember choosing to take a nap instead of go, and being told that that reflected how terrible my life attitude was. I still don’t regret it.

ADAM Probably by Madeline, right?

BROOM By you too! “Instead of seeing Nelson Mandela, huh?” I was very sleepy in those days.

BETH Honestly, that was a bad choice.

ADAM They did a whole fake graduation, they put up all of the graduation banners and the chairs and everything, in, like, October, to give him an honorary degree, which was only like the third time they’d done that in history. They did it for George Washington. And, you know, Nelson Mandela’s a good guy! But, I don’t know, he’s not, like… George Washington. But everyone in the 90s was very self-congratulatory about having this figure of greatness in our midst. And this movie is all about, sort of, very self-congratulatory greatness.

BROOM All right — thesis, to be rejected, that I just came up with: exoticism is this running theme through all of aesthetic history. There’s always some Orient that you want to portray. And we’ve become very self-hating about that. And so there’s this idea that if you just love it, all, you’re allowed to be exoticist. As long as you say “Africa is a place where people are real!” you get to do all the same shit. And that’s what this attitude is for. It’s an excuse to do something that we would do, one way or the other; at least we can say that we’re doing it responsibly… by showing that “Da monkey man — He know da secret! I know da way!”

ADAM Well, yeah. I acknowledge that it’s going to read really badly when I compared Nelson Mandela with a baboon.

BROOM No! They did it! It was in this movie. The only character who spoke with a remotely African affect was the monkey.

ADAM The Magical Negro. To use a term that I did not invent.

BROOM Everyone in this movie was presumably African, but only he was black.

ADAM Except, interestingly, for Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick. It’s like they understand that —

BROOM Or Rowan Atkinson and Jeremy Irons.

ADAM But they’re not real characters, they’re comic or villanous characters…

BROOM Or Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella.

ADAM The sympathetic and noble characters, i.e. the lions who are not the villain lions, are all black…

BETH Except for the women.

ADAM No, they were all black! Nala was black, and Sarabi was black. And Simba’s singing voice was black. But it was like it was too much to have an actual black actor voice Simba.

BROOM And the only reason this is offensive is because they’ve already entered into this devil’s pact where it’s purporting to be “responsible, respectful Africanism” blah blah blah, in the first place. If it was just the old-fashioned attitude of like “It’s going to take place in Africa with a lot of animals from Africa,” and then of course they were all white, Sterling Holloway or whoever, we would just think, “yeah, they just told a story in their own terms and borrowed a few exotic elements that were exciting to them.” But once they claim, “No! We explored the true meaning of blah blah blah…” then we say, “No you didn’t; you’re bullshitting.” And that’s what becomes offensive.

ADAM Yeah, I agree with that.

BROOM Let’s go to Beth’s experience watching it for the first time, not knowing what was going to happen.

ADAM You knew what was going to happen!

BROOM Did you? Did you know that the father was going to die?

BETH Yes!

BROOM From the beginning?

BETH Pretty early, yeah. I think they foreshadowed that pretty well.

BROOM When Simba asks, “will you be around forever?” and he says, “Well… the stars…”

BETH I think even before that, I was thinking, “this is clearly going to be one of those things where the kid…” oh, because as soon as the brother’s introduced, and you know that he’s not going to be the king, and the kid will…

ADAM What Shakespeare play is this?

BROOM Hamlet.

ADAM Oh right.

BROOM But in Hamlet, the mother conspires with the uncle.

ADAM That’s true, but that would be too much. That’s a little heavy.

BROOM Also, in Hamlet, everyone dies at the end. As opposed to him holding up Hamlet Junior, and then “Boom! HAMLET!”

ADAM I felt bad for the other species that they all had to bow down to the lion. Like, don’t the zebras have their own king?

BROOM You said the same thing about Bambi! “It’s creepy that they have to come and say hello to the young prince.”

ADAM Well, I mean that. Like, have some spine, people! They eat you!

BROOM It was totally Bambi plus The Jungle Book.

BETH I didn’t get sad when the dad died, which is weird. I think which means that the movie was flawed somehow.

ADAM Yeah. I couldn’t wait for the dad to die.

BROOM Even when he crawled under the paw of the dead body and tried to curl up?

BETH I cry at everything. I really do. I didn’t even get close to crying at this movie. I think it’s because of what you were saying before: it was so schematic…

ADAM I couldn’t wait for Jeremy Irons to rip Simba’s face off. I mean, I always used to root for Tom and for Wile E. Coyote, but this really — I mean, how could you root for James Earl Jones? You know? “This is CNN!” What are we rooting for, here? That’s like rooting for…

BROOM A rock.

ADAM … a United Airlines commercial.

BROOM Well, I wasn’t rooting for Scar. The whole hyena subplot — that’s where the racism would usually slip into it, but it wasn’t even fully fleshed out. What was their relationship to the hyenas, and what was Scar’s special relationship to them? They were the outcasts? They’re just hyenas. I don’t know what it meant.

BETH They were from a desolate place, and wanted the riches of the plain.

ADAM Yeah, they didn’t want to work for it.

BROOM And then they drank it dry? It was the hyenas’ fault?

BETH Yeah. It got overpopulated and they used up all the resources.

BROOM That’s why all the water was gone?

BETH I think so.

BROOM As Adam said in the middle, that has nothing to do with hyenas. Hyenas just are scavengers, so the whole thing was BS.

ADAM I would like to have seen a little more of the overlordery of Jeremy Irons. If they’re going to make him into Hitler, it would have been satisfying to see him smack Simba’s mother across the face a couple times. Yes, I know he did that once.

BROOM He wasn’t Hitler. They just ripped off the goosestepping because that song was desperate. They just wanted stuff to put in there. It’s tasteless.

BETH I guess you’re right, but that’s a weird direction to go.

BROOM I mean, how tasteless is it really? I don’t know… but still, it’s tasteless because of the desperation.

BETH And this was one year after Schindler’s List?

BROOM Well, Schindler’s List was also just a movie.

ADAM I made a joke about this, but it is interesting to think about this in terms of Schindler’s List. They have the same kind of feel, watching them, in a sort of weird way.

BROOM I’m willing to hear this out… but I don’t see it.

ADAM I don’t know, like… don’t you feel like the point of Schindler’s List was to come out and be, like, [hushed and exaggerated] “That was so moving. The Holocaust was awful.” I mean, this is a Disney movie, of course, and it’s not as good as Schindler’s List, but it’s still aiming for the same kind of cheap gravity.

BROOM I gotta say, I think that Schindler’s List — and I haven’t seen it in ten years or so — is pretty good and pretty smart. The things that struck me hardest in Schindler’s List were all these specific awful moments, things that really happened. The point of it was less this generic sanctimoniousness, “wasn’t the Holocaust awful” — it was the horror of the immediacy of these situations. They shot three people in a row and you were next in line, and you lived, but you knew those people… All these horrible, exciting, horrible-exciting things. The kid climbs down into the outhouse pit, and that’s how she escapes being found — someone’s grandmother really did that. That was what was gripping about Schindler’s List. Which I suppose you could say is in poor taste for a different reason. But I didn’t feel like it was a weepy “oh, we all deserve a pat on the back for watching a movie about a terrible thing.”

ADAM That’s fair. Admittedly my views of Schindler’s List are probably retroactively colored by Life is Beautiful in a way that is unfortunate.

BROOM Yes; they are not the same movie! Whereas this, I felt, really was — maybe sanctimonious isn’t the right word, but self-congratulatory for its seriousness.

ADAM And it’s the generic-ness of it that makes it distasteful. It’s so trope-ic, if you will, that it’s hard to see it as anything other than, you know…

BROOM That’s how I felt at the time: like, there is no “Simba.” There is no “Mufasa.” There is no “The Lion King”! It’s “that one with the lions,” but there’s no core to it. That’s how I feel about this movie.

ADAM And then to have all of that with a little bit of ‘tude in the middle is especially jarring and of its time.

BROOM “What do you want me to do, dress in drag and do the hula?”

ADAM That was very Tiny Toons, that cut-away. And the lyrics.

BROOM You knew it was Nathan Lane, right?

BETH I didn’t. I would have been even more annoyed.

BROOM The two of them are totally Ren and Stimpy rip-offs. Not that they act like them, but they look like them.

BETH Yes. They do.

BROOM There’s just a lot of ripping off going on here, and no shame about it. No sense of better standards. And you know, honestly, if the SFX department actually spelled out “SFX” in the dust, we shouldn’t be angry that it looks like it says “SEX,” we should be angry that these movies are so in-jokey self-involved. Who is thinking about the children?

ADAM “It’s a small world after all…” “Anything but that!”

BROOM Even when he says that thing about “my baby brother,” it’s lines out of that twins movie that I just watched.

ADAM “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” “Like you?”

BROOM “Oops.” So what were you going to say about the quality of the artistry?

ADAM I feel disappointed. I remember this as being one of my favorites. I think of this and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast as being the really good ones.

BROOM Those three and this were the uncontested resurgence of the golden age. What’s next after this, Pocahontas? Which was, I think everyone agreed, a failure in a lot of ways. These were the four where everyone was saying “Disney is on a roll!” After this they get more ambivalent.

ADAM Sorry, Beth.

BETH There are just so many more!

ADAM But they get more interesting.

BROOM I found this very interesting to watch.

BETH Really?? I didn’t find it interesting. Why did you find it interesting? Because you hadn’t seen it in a while?

BROOM Because of that thing I said before about my objection. It’s art without sincerity at a very elaborate level of execution.

ADAM I’m going to rest on “a filmed Maya Angelou poem” as my expression of why it is dated.

BROOM Appropriateness for child-rearing?

ADAM Highly.

BROOM Even the part where Nala looks up at him? You agreed with me when you saw the shot, didn’t you?

BETH Yeah. Because it lingered a little bit too long on her sexy look.

ADAM Well there’s no other males in the pride, you know…

BROOM How does that work?

ADAM They drive out the adolescent male lions, right? Isn’t that what happens in real life?

BROOM I don’t know.

ADAM I’ll tell you when I get back from Africa!

BROOM I’m surprised that you guys don’t find in watching a thing like this that there’s some sense — maybe not of “satisfaction”…

ADAM I found it very engaging to be seeing this even as I was disapproving of it.

BETH I was a little bored, but not… it was fine.

BROOM I feel consistently that as bad movies go, these are really exceptionally skillful bad movies, and lively bad movies, and interesting to watch.

BETH Well, they’re skillful, I agree. Those people are pros at making the bad movies look like accessible, entertaining…

BROOM They’re like bad rollercoasters — you’re going to get pulled around these curves no matter what. And playing the game of guessing how it’s going to work — even now, because I don’t always remember, because it hardly matters. At the end, when you guys were guessing moment by moment how things would play out, that’s us playing along, and I enjoy that game.

ADAM So do you prefer James Earl Jones as Mufasa, or James Earl Jones as the king in Coming to America?

BROOM I haven’t seen Coming to America.

BETH I haven’t seen all of Coming to America.

ADAM It is so good. I love it. Of course I love this too.

BROOM Do you still love it? Or do you feel disappointed.

ADAM Well, no. I feel disappointed, but I can understand why I loved it. Look, portentous liberalism was very appealing to me when I was fourteen! I drew pictures of President Clinton and Hillary Clinton on the lawn of the White House, and put them in my notebook.

BROOM Flying on an eagle.

ADAM Basically, yeah.

BROOM That’s cool. Do you still have those pictures?

ADAM Yeah, in my file.

[we read the Times review]

ADAM I think the 90s had a sense — this was the period in which history was over, right? And we sort of mistook shallowness for greatness during that period, in a way that is depressing but very much characteristic of a time of basic peace and prosperity. That period between the fall of the Berlin wall and September 11th, everyone referred to it as a sort of parenthesis from history. This just has that feel of… faked seriousness.

BETH Yeah, but I think it was innocent. I think it was genuine.

ADAM I don’t think it was malevolent. I agree with that.

BROOM I think that was Janet Maslin’s best yet. I think she nailed it. And I respect her for it. We said we wanted to make a point of including this: she said it had a “very 1990s ethos,” which made Adam go “woo-hoo,” and I wanted to go “woo-hoo” when she said it was far more calculated than the ones before. I felt like we were all validated. By Janet Maslin agreeing with us.

BETH Where to start?

BROOM You should start, because your reaction is the freshest.

BETH It seemed very of its time. They had no shame about making very timely cultural references.

ADAM You groaned at Jack Nicholson; that was what killed it for you.

BETH But right before that he was doing somebody else.

BROOM I’ll bet Arsenio Hall is what got you. When he went “woop woop woop.”

ADAM I didn’t even get that.

BETH There was a Schwarzenegger reference, too. There were so many. And they were also very self-referential — Disney-referential — all over the place. I felt like they were trying to stick in as many references as they could. They had the crab from The Little Mermaid briefly. And he was wearing the Goofy hat at the end. There are so many that I can’t even remember specific examples.

ADAM Well, did you enjoy that, or did you resent it?

BROOM How relevant is this all to what you thought of the movie?

BETH The movie was not boring, and kept me interested the entire time. And I thought those jokes were amusing, but in a long-term way, unsuccessful. Although, well…it reminded me of Looney Tunes, how they would always reference things of the era, and now it seems charming. So maybe in twenty years… But it has been twenty years, right?

BROOM Fifteen or so.

ADAM Eighteen.

BETH So I guess it’s charming. But I know those references; kids of the 2040s aren’t going to get any of those weird jokes.

BROOM There are still some that I don’t know. Who is he doing when he says that there are a few quid pro quos? [ed.: William F. Buckley]

BETH When he was being the Macy’s parade float commentators, who were they supposed to be?

BROOM I don’t know if they were specific people.

ADAM When he says “aren’t they lovely, June?”

BETH And “Harry.” [ed.: apparently nobody in particular]

ADAM Some of them were already gone, you’re right. But those jokes in Looney Tunes were actually much of what I enjoyed as a kid. The old vaudeville stuff that I didn’t get. I enjoyed the sense that there was a joke that I didn’t get, and some day I’d get it.

BROOM When someone would look like Mae West for a second?

ADAM You mean, like, Bugs Bunny? Yes, right. I’d strain to get jokes that were over my head, which made me feel included in something really funny.

BETH So maybe it works. Maybe it was fine.

BROOM Well, you watched it now; what did you think?

BETH I thought I was going to be annoyed by Robin Williams, but he was at his Robin-Williamsy best.

ADAM It’s kind of an understated Robin Williams. For Robin Williams.

BETH He was doing the full thing that he does, but not in an over-the-top way.

BROOM Because the directors chose where to use it. Carefully.

ADAM There’s not that much shtick — there’s probably only seven solid minutes of shtick.

BROOM But they’re so fast-paced.

BETH Very. The songs were shitty.

ADAM And yet so magical.

BETH The first song was, I thought, so bad.

BROOM “One Jump Ahead of the bad guys,” or whatever that’s called?

BETH Yes.

ADAM “Street rat!”

BROOM “Still I think he’s rather tasty!”

BETH He can’t sing!

BROOM He sounds real gay.

BETH But also just nasally and annoying.

BROOM “Gotta eat to live, gotta live to eat! Otherwise we’d get alooong!”

BETH Yes.

ADAM All right, but “A Whole New World,” I can attest, is a song all my friends know.

BETH I didn’t realize that it was that until the refrain. Then I was like, “Oh, this is the movie where ‘A Whole New World’ comes from!” Even though you had been singing it.

ADAM There’s at least one other song that I think is pretty good. I think “Prince Ali” is a pretty funny song.

BROOM No. It doesn’t mean anything to me.

BETH I don’t even remember it.

ADAM “Prince Ali, mighty is he, Ali Ababwa.”

BROOM I don’t mind “Friend Like Me” and I don’t mind “Whole New World.” The other two are nothin’.

ADAM I like the “Arabian Nights” song at the beginning.

BETH My favorite part was the most Dumbo-y part.

BROOM “Friend Like Me.”

BETH Yeah. That was cool.

ADAM The parade in Prince Ali is funny.

BROOM So as a whole… you said it was interesting the whole time…

BETH It kept my attention. I was getting very tired, but it had nothing to do with the movie, and I didn’t fall asleep.

ADAM I think the Robin Williams sort of cuts the Broadway schmaltz. They have both themes, and they’re both oppressive in and of themselves, but together they’re sort of…

BETH Bearable.

BROOM Well, I thought the whole attitude — not just the Robin Williams but the whole thing — was of very shticky business.

ADAM I mean, Gilbert Gottfried is your parrot?

BETH I thought he was writing his own lines. He was just being Gilbert Gottfried.

ADAM So was Robin Williams. Right.

BROOM But I felt like the use of shtick was all in the same spirit as the Robin Williams. I didn’t think it was like Broadway. Well, I guess it was like “Spamalot.” But I didn’t think there was a treacly Broadway quality. I feel like there’s hardly any emotion in it whatsoever. How did you feel about the story?

ADAM Did you like either of them? Did you root for their love interest?

BETH I didn’t care about the characters.

ADAM He’s so handsome.

BROOM I think the character design is fine, but his eyes and nose wobble around inconsistently.

ADAM No, the way his eyes bulge out — he’s so handsome.

BETH Her eyes drove me nuts. I thought her eyes were the biggest ever that any Disney character has ever had. They were like anime eyes. There was white all the way around her pupils.

ADAM Yes! Right! Because her eyes were so bulgy! His were the same way. I find that extremely endearing.

BROOM I felt like their character animation, their acting, was lacking — they were just shtick figures.

ADAM Here’s a serious question: do you think the Orpheus-slash-Lot’s wife plot device of “don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch — oh, you touched it!” is effective? Ever? Is it ever effective? Because every time it happens in a movie, my heart stops. Did you see … it’s set in Spain during the civil war, and she’s a little girl…

BROOM Pan’s Labyrinth; I didn’t see it.

ADAM There’s the same thing.

BETH But it works on you.

ADAM It always works on me.

BROOM It works as a bit, it works fine. When someone pulls a book out of a bookcase and it spins around, that works for me too. I don’t care. But the actual story of this movie… So Aladdin was “the diamond in the rough” — he was the only person in the world who could enter that cave? Why? Because of what?

BETH Yeah. They cut out the part that explains why.

ADAM Because he’s a good guy!

BROOM It was his destiny.

BETH Because he’s clever.

ADAM Does this actually bother you?

BROOM Does it bother you that the guy who started telling us the story never reappears? That bothered me even when I was a kid.

ADAM No!

BETH I didn’t even notice that.

ADAM It’s Robin Williams again, so it doesn’t matter! But no, it never bothered me that, like — why is Frodo the one? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

BROOM I mean, I understand. The plot is just to keep each scene going; it’s just there to get this show on the road.

ADAM I think her dad was effectively a buffoon.

BETH I liked the dad.

ADAM He had more than one personality trait, and he was funny.

BETH That actor — who is that guy? He plays the bumbly old man in other things.

BROOM Oh, really? I don’t know who it is. [ed. Douglas Seale (?)]

ADAM Although Jafar is offensively gay, even moreso than Ursula…

BROOM But then at the end he’s supposed to be lusting for Jasmine; he has no other motivation than that he actually has the hots for her.

ADAM I understand that.

BETH It doesn’t matter. He’s super-gay.

ADAM It doesn’t matter; he’s the gayest… well, until Uncle Scar.

BROOM That’s right. This was like, “if only we could have had Jeremy Irons!” Then they get him. But he’s good — I like watching Jafar. He certainly has the most interesting designs. He and the genie have cool features.

BETH Is Robin Williams gay?

BROOM I don’t believe so. I believe he’s been married for a long time. [ed.: was until divorce in 2008]

ADAM I think that’s cocaine that you’re thinking of.

BROOM I think that’s chest hair that you’re thinking of.

BETH I mean, he slips into that persona sometimes.

ADAM I saw Mrs. Doubtfire!

BROOM I saw Bicentennial Man! Anyway, at the end — just to finish my plot questions — when he’s like, “you’re free! you’re free!” And then he’s sad because now he can’t marry her, because of that law, and the stupid deus ex machina turns out to be that the sultan could have changed the law at any time. But aren’t you also at that moment thinking, “well, now that the genie is free, he can do favors, right?” He can do whatever he wants for anyone he wants!

BETH I was thinking maybe he’d say, “you get twenty-hundred wishes now.”

ADAM But the genie doesn’t operate by normal human rules.

BROOM He’s not bound by any rules at the end.

BETH I thought maybe he wouldn’t be a genie after he was freed.

ADAM You thought he was going to turn into, like, The Beast.

BETH I thought he would just be a blue man.

BROOM It’s true. He shouldn’t really have those powers. They’re dangerous powers to have.

ADAM And certainly if Jafar is ever set free…

BROOM Ten thousand years in the future — but that could be soon, now!

ADAM Right.

BROOM And also: you’re not allowed to wish for more wishes, but you’re allowed to wish to be a sorcerer capable of doing anything that you want?

BETH Right, that’s not fair. And also, why can’t you wish for more wishes?

ADAM The sorcerer can’t do everything.

BROOM I know they say that, but what could the sorcerer not do that the genie could do?

ADAM Make her fall in love with him?

BROOM The genie couldn’t do that.

ADAM The genie could probably do that, he just won’t do that.

BETH When he was a sorcerer he couldn’t do that.

ADAM The sorcerer can just do conjuring, and sending people places, but he couldn’t transform things.

BROOM He turned himself into a giant snake!

ADAM Yeah, that’s conjuring.

BROOM He encased her in a giant hourglass. All right: I like about this movie that it is visually stylish in a way that hearkens back to the old ones and is also totally garish in a new, 90s way, and is just exuberant about its garishness.

ADAM I love the gardens of the palace.

BETH I do too! That was one of my favorite set pieces.

BROOM I thought this movie had the best backgrounds in years.

BETH It did have really good backgrounds.

ADAM And I like when they’re sitting on the roof of the Forbidden Palace. And I like… … different things.

BETH It seemed kind of stupid, but I enjoyed it.

BROOM It was right on the line for me. Because when I first saw it, I loved it, and now part of me was thinking, “this is so cheesy.”

BETH You know what’s good about it? It’s not preachy, like most of the Disney movies have been.

BROOM It’s just like pixy stix.

ADAM Well, there is a moral, but the moral is, like, “free yourself!”

BETH Yeah, it’s like “be yourself! and free yourself!” but…

BROOM The moral is the least important thing in the script. They don’t care.

ADAM But it is a perfect message for the 90s. It’s this vapid sort of “do whatever you want!” There’s no actual content to it. I suppose he has a sense of duty in that he frees the genie, but afterward he gets everything he wants, basically.

BROOM It is vapid, and that is what was troubling to me about it now. It was flashy in a really obnoxious way, to sell vapidity. I was thinking about that thing that John Kricfalusi said about ‘tude — this is the movie he shows, because every expression Aladdin makes is like [face-scrunch with smirk].

ADAM That’s why he’s so cute!

BETH So he’s your favorite?

ADAM Tarzan is my favorite. But he’s pretty cute. He has those big neotenous eyes that make you just wanna hug him.

BETH But he’s not manly at all. He’s like a boy. He looks like your brother, kind of.

ADAM Oh no!

BROOM Way to poison the well!

ADAM You don’t think [my boyfriend] looks anything like that? With the wide eyes and the mischievous expression?

BETH I see sort of a puppy dog thing going on with both people, but no.

ADAM I mean, he doesn’t have a thieving monkey, but…

BROOM Or does he? It’s funny you say Aladdin is like a boy, because I was going to say, this movie had less of an element of “what am I going to be when I grow up” than almost any other before it.

BETH Okay, but he’s like a seventeen-year-old.

ADAM It has a strong element of that — he wants to be rich. He wants to be consequential.

BETH He wants to be comfortable.

BROOM He wants not to be running from the law all the time, but that’s just wanting to change his life, it’s not wanting to grow up into something new.

BETH There was no mention of growing up.

ADAM Did Belle really want to grow up?

BROOM Yeah, she wanted to leave that town.

ADAM She wanted to go to cool parties. She wanted to go to NYU.

BROOM Yes, exactly, which I think is a metaphor we brought up before. She wanted to go away into her future.

BETH Aladdin wanted to go away to the palace.

ADAM Just because it meant he’d be rich.

BROOM Jasmine’s situation is more the traditional situation.

ADAM And she does leave, she climbs over the wall. I like that she slips back into “but I’m the princess!” as soon as it’s convenient. She actually does mature a little bit over the course of the movie, and so does he. Convincingly so. I believe their character arcs.

BROOM Yeah, it works. Their minor character arcs. But just like we were saying about Home Alone a minute ago — they are very rich. They have everything they want. And all the diversions of the movie take place within the narrow realm of utter luxury.

ADAM He doesn’t, necessarily.

BROOM Yes. He is very poor. She is very rich. Okay, wait, another plot point: his first wish is to be a prince. Then later it turns out he might need another wish to be a real prince. He needs to wish to actually be a prince.

BETH I don’t understand that one.

BROOM If his first wish were to look like a prince, then that would be different.

ADAM I think he got turned into a prince but then the sorcerer turned him back into a street rat, so then he needs to toggle back into “prince.”

BROOM Hm.

BETH Why, once he got hold of the lamp, didn’t it go back?

ADAM Like it should reset?

BETH Yeah, it should reset.

ADAM But then you could just hand it back and forth between you and your friend, forever.

BROOM It’s per person.

BETH Yeah, and why couldn’t he just give it to, like, her?

BROOM Because he promised he would let the genie free. He promised to be the last person to get the benefit of the lamp. Okay, now the greater cultural thing. So we said that the vapidity suited the 90s… Don’t you feel a little bit like you’re looking at….

ADAM The story of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

BETH The economic climate of the day?

BROOM The cultural climate of now. When I first saw it, I remember thinking that “Friend Like Me” was painfully fast. I didn’t understand what half the things I was seeing were.

BETH But now, didn’t you feel like you got them all?

BROOM I’ve seen it enough times. But you, for the first time, you understood everything he was saying and every visual that went with it?

BETH Yeah. But that’s part of being my age. If I were eleven or whatever, I wouldn’t have gotten it all.

BROOM I just felt like it was overloaded and in-your-face in a way that was a little bit beyond reasonable. Even at the beginning, when the shopkeeper is talking, it was already very fast; every half-line has its own visual shtick.

ADAM You just hadn’t seen enough rap music at that point.

BROOM It felt like…

BETH An onslaught.

BROOM Like an overstuffed way of thinking about movie time. At the expense of content.

BETH It’s vaudevillian.

BROOM Well, they think it’s vaudevillian, but it’s such a rat-a-tat machine gun kind of vaudeville. And then Hercules is that, times a few. It’s the same thing cranked even further up.

ADAM Really, this is like Shrek.

BROOM I know a lot of people hate Shrek, but I actually thought it had a sense of pacing.

ADAM I like Shrek, and I like this.

BROOM I enjoyed this, but I feel like this is like enjoying something somewhat distasteful. I feel like if you had showed this to the 1945 audience, or whenever, they would have thought, “that was offensive! and abrasive!”

BETH I think you’re right. It is abrasive.

ADAM But you probably think Christina Aguilera is abrasive. Actually I should really say: you probably think Katy Perry is abrasive.

[digression on this subject ensues]

ADAM I mean, it’s candy-colored and, you know…

BROOM And Jasmine’s waist is tiny, and there’s absolutely no reason to do that other than reflexive sexualizing of everything.

ADAM She’s pretty, and he’s super-hot. And it’s hot to imagine them together. It’s like it’s hot to imagine Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake making out. It’s hot.

BROOM Doesn’t it make you feel that something is distasteful when the culture asks, “what should we show our eight-year-olds? How about Bratz?” Maybe not! So maybe not this either.

BETH I don’t think it was necessary for her proportions to be that extreme. She was also wearing a bikini and had gigantic breasts. Not gigantic, but.

BROOM Not by cartoon standards.

BETH By my standards, those were very large breasts.

BROOM They were just modest 34Ds. Standard cartoon size.

BETH And then her off-the-shoulder whatever.

BROOM That’s how things are in ye olden times. I like that she’s wearing basically a nakedness suit the whole time, and then at the end when he’s slutted up the place, she’s wearing a red suit that is exactly as revealing. Which means “oh, he dirtied her innocence.”

BETH I think somehow the high ponytail equals “slut.”

BROOM She was lugging around a lot of hair.

ADAM I liked that at the end, Aladdin does not get to have a prince hat, but he has a stripey hat that’s sort of rich-colored in its own way. I don’t know where he got it.

BROOM How, when Jafar disguises himself as an old man…

BETH … does he do the teeth??

BROOM Yes! Impossible!!

ADAM It doesn’t matter! He’s a vizier!

BROOM I know, he has all kinds of powers even before he has powers. Bits that I thought were cool, then, and I still like: when he stands inside the window, like a Buster Keaton thing, when the tower is rolling over him.

ADAM I love that. And I love the design of the cave mouth.

BROOM Good use of CGI! You said “oh, CGI-tastic,” but I thought it was well-used throughout. Like, the magic carpet is a good use of CGI.

BETH I really liked the magic carpet a lot. I thought that was well done.

ADAM Albeit, animated exactly like the rug in Beauty and the Beast.

BROOM What rug?

ADAM The rug that turns into the dog.

BROOM That’s a footstool.

ADAM Oh, it is a footstool, but it has similar tassels.

BROOM But they did more interesting things here. Like when he walked away dejected, folded over. I thought all the CGI had aged well because it had been used with taste, with an eye for its otherworldliness. The lion head, and the tower, all that stuff was smart. But yes, the movie is just bit after bit after bit. The Star Wars part when he flies out of the collapsing cave? Okay, sure, we’ll take some of that for two seconds. Now what?

BETH I felt like the people who made this were challenging themselves to do that, to see how much they could pile on. It didn’t have the soul of The Little Mermaid or even Beauty and the Beast. Which is fine.

ADAM Fine guys, go watch The Sorrow and the Pity.

BETH What year is this? 93? Totally Clinton. It feels like it’s of that time.

BROOM Say more about what the characteristic of that time is.

ADAM Vapid. Ahistorical.

BETH Yes, ahistorical.

BROOM That’s my favorite way for things to be!

ADAM Well, it turns out it’s a lot nicer.

BROOM “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

BETH This is the movie that is made during a time of general well-being.

BROOM Yeah, not like Home on the Range.

BETH We’ll see.

[the New York Times review is read as always]

BETH I think that what we just heard — Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson singing the radio version of “Beauty and the Beast” — is the kind of thing that, at the time, made me think that Disney movies were not for me anymore. There was nothing in that song for me to connect with. I was too cool for it by the time that this came out.

BROOM You probably were too cool for the movie, too.

BETH Yeah, I guess I was.

BROOM How do you feel about it now, when ‘cool’ is not as much of an issue?

BETH I was very entertained by it.

ADAM It’s so shamelessly and unapologetically enthusiastic about what it is that it’s extremely infectious. It’s like Glee fifteen years earlier.

BROOM Yeah, it isn’t trying to moderate itself in any way. But I don’t think that it was aiming for camp appeal in the way that something like Glee is. Nowadays, if Disney did a big-Broadway-number-type movie…

BETH They’d sort of do it with a wink.

BROOM They’d have to do it with a wink because they know that the wink has become part of it, now. I don’t think it was then at all. “Bonjour! Good day!” — it’s just being presented as “we think this is a great opening number!”

BETH I think they were really proud of that. Which is fine!

ADAM It will turn into a wink in about five years, when we get to Hercules and Emperor’s New Groove. But for now it’s just like… [imitates power chords] BOM!!! BOM!!! BOM!!!

BETH And then that BOM leads into a whole other number. There’s no breath between these lavish things.

BROOM Yes, well, that’s why I wanted to make sure you understood that the redundant second castle production number was added for the re-release and wasn’t part of the original movie.

ADAM Her face looked a little weird. It looked a little bit lippy, up close. I remember thinking that the animation in this was breathtaking, because of the stained glass and the chandelier twirl shot from above.

BROOM The CGI felt foreign to the rest of it, and some of the choices — like that shot where the cups and plates multiply to infinity — still represent a primitive kind of thinking about how to use the computer.

ADAM As a kid I wouldn’t have understood the Busby Berkeley-ish reference when they’re all diving.

BROOM There sure are a lot of spoons floating in that fruit punch.

ADAM Or some of the other references — like I said at one point that it’s so Sound of Music when she’s spiraling on the hilltop.

BETH She was even sort of dressed like Maria. And she was dressed like Snow White, too, I thought.

BROOM Dorothy, I thought.

ADAM Whereas in earlier movies you got the impression that the animators were dorky straight dudes who were quivering over the female heroines, here I got the impression that the animators were dorky gay dudes who were, like, total Broadway fags.

BROOM I read a couple of blog posts recently that I’m reminded of. One, which is not totally related to this, was on John Kricfalusi’s blog, which I think I may have mentioned previously, where he talks often about ‘tude and how vacuous displays of “attitude” have taken over so much of mainstream cartooning and animation. And somewhere I think he says that the Disney style of the past 30 years was invented by gay artists at CalArts — that it’s a very particularly southern California gay invention.

ADAM This seemed awfully gay.

BROOM And on another animation blog I read recently, by a guy who’s very much a fan of the Disney features, he said that he doesn’t like this one so much because the animation is really inconsistent character to character. That the Beast is glorious whereas some of the secondary characters are really simplistic.

ADAM I thought the same thing. They didn’t really bother with anyone except for Gaston and the Beast and her.

BROOM But my response to that comment is that since the movie operated on this pulling-out-all-the-stops-Broadway-crowd-pleaser level — first this kind of number, now this kind of number, now comic relief, now romance! everything for everyone! — I didn’t mind the stylistic inconsistency in the visuals because the overall attitude was stylistic heterogeneity. There’s really no reason why the “Gaston” number and the “Beauty and the Beast” number should be in the same visual style at all; they’re not in the same dramatic style either. … Well, I don’t know, that’s obviously a little bit of a rationalization. But I didn’t mind it when I was a kid and I’m not sure that I minded it now. But I do ultimately mind that the movie is such a production. I actually prefer Little Mermaid because it’s simpler.

ADAM Oh, I don’t know.

BROOM I think that the impact of Little Mermaid is actually stronger, to me. And I know that this was, like, “believe it or not, you’ll cry at an animated movie!” — but it feels so obviously stage-managed and constructed.

ADAM It feels like drag. But glorious, pretty, lush drag. It felt like a Judy Garland Christmas special.

BROOM After the first number you guys were saying that “they’re not even disguising that it’s all Broadway — it’s like it was actually written for Broadway”… and I think that there is some truth to that, that they were thinking forward to the idea of a stage show even as they were developing the movie.

BETH I thought that later it sort of lost that feeling.

BROOM But to me, a stage show is always going to be weak in comparison to a cartoon. I feel like the cartoon actually makes real what theater lovers are picturing in their minds. When the strings are rising up and she runs to the cliffside and the camera pulls up over the trees, and the clouds go by and the wind blows — that doesn’t really happen on stage, but that’s what’s supposed to be going on in your head. Whereas it can happen in an animated movie. So I feel like what’s the point, after this?

ADAM Backup dancers are like a trick to make you think that there’s a glorious upsurge of life, out of the corners of your eye, but in a movie the camera can just do that itself.

BROOM And this also gets at why this movie isn’t totally satisfying to me — it is so stage-y. In “Be Our Guest,” they’re like, “let’s line them up like dancers in a show!” instead of creating something more genuinely cinematic.

ADAM Is that so different from “Kiss the Girl” or “Under the Sea”?

BROOM Well, “Under the Sea” is pretty similar, but in “Kiss the Girl,” they’re in a boat in a lagoon under a tree, and fish are jumping over them — it’s a sight, certainly, but it doesn’t feel like you’re sitting with a stage in front of you.

ADAM But the “Be Our Guest” number is the “Under the Sea” number; just like “There must be more than this provincial life” is the “Part of Your World.”

BROOM The “I Want song,” as it’s called by Alan Menken theater geeks.

ADAM That’s a good concept.

BROOM It’s a concept that’s taught in terrible music theater programs.

ADAM Because it’s so derivative?

BROOM Well, I’m saying “terrible” because that’s just the formula. You know you’re at a certain kind of show when it starts with “Where is My Turn? When is it gonna be My Turn?”

ADAM That’ll be the next ten movies. They’re all like that. Wait ’til we get to the Mulan one.

BROOM I don’t remember what that song is. But I know what she wants.

ADAM She wants to be a warrior.

BROOM Beth and I were talking about how the mothers are always absent, and I came up with a theory, which probably isn’t original to me: that the ur-story of all of these movies is growing up and finding your adult self, becoming a person… and if the parent of the same sex as the child were present, it would be too clear what the child would grow up to be like, what model of adulthood they were either aiming at or specifically rejecting. If Belle had a mother, we would instantly think “Oh, Belle’s kind of like her mother,” or “Oh, Belle’s nothing like her mother,” and that would become the story. By not having a mother it’s more about “What is Belle like? Who is she going to be?” Do you buy that?

ADAM Does that apply in movies where there’s a boy hero?

BROOM There aren’t very many with a boy hero, but it applies to The Jungle Book, where there are no parents. And it applies to The Sword in the Stone where he has no parents.

ADAM Tarzan.

BROOM As Beth pointed out, The Rescuers Down Under is about a boy who has a mother but no father, though it’s not very much about the boy. There aren’t a lot of great examples about boys because most of them really are about girls. And my theory about that is that if a girl goes on adventures, that appeals to both sexes, whereas if a boy does girlish things, that appeals to nobody.

BETH It’s hard for me to believe that girls going on adventures really does appeal to boys.

ADAM Traditionally, boy heroes are thought to be better crossovers than girl heroes.

BROOM Then why are all these movies about girls?

ADAM They’re not about girls, they’re about love. If you’re going to have a familiar character and a distant character, the familiar character has to be the girl and the distant character has to be the boy. Except in The Jungle Book.

BROOM This one was a straight-up romance, and it seems like they must have just abandoned hope of the boy market. The upcoming Rapunzel movie they’re calling Tangled so that they can try to get boys in there. Whereas this title screen was like red ribbon and marble.

BETH Kind of ugly, actually.

ADAM But this was hugely successful, right?

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM So: I feel like the Gaston character is like an indictment of my whole value system. He’s unlike all other Disney villains, which I think is cool. He’s not like a typical lisping uncle — it’s a little more creative.

BROOM Well, I’m gonna do a deep callback here: he is like Brom Bones from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

ADAM That’s true. But he is unlike Uncle Scar, or Ursula, or Jafar.

BROOM That’s right. He’s a parody of masculinity, rather than unmasculine.

ADAM I think the great success of the animation in this is that they make Gaston look sort of ugly-hot, whereas the Beast is sort of convincingly, like… cute.

BROOM Hot-ugly.

BETH I don’t know. The Beast…

ADAM You didn’t want to kiss the Beast?

BETH No, I didn’t.

BROOM I was thinking that, during this movie: “I know that Beth likes doggies, but I don’t think she’s a lion mane type. I don’t think she goes for Fabios.”

ADAM I kind of wanted to kiss the Beast, as a child.

BROOM [to the tune of ‘The Mob Song’]: “Kiss the Beast! Kiss the Beast!!”

ADAM I was disappointed when he turned into a person.

BETH Yeah. He looked really bad as a person.

BROOM Well, he’s just the person version of Fabio.

BETH He’s not, though. He’s just a mushy, lippy guy.

ADAM It was also disappointing to me that all of our friends turn into these alien human forms. Do you really want to see Chip as a tow-headed little boy?

BETH No. He’s much cuter as a cup.

BROOM I think the French maid looked better as a maid than as a duster. I feel like she’s not sexy enough as a duster.

BETH That was the one actual sexy woman in the whole movie.

BROOM No, that’s not true. There are three identical sexy women.

BETH Oh, the three blondes.

ADAM But they’re jokes. And they don’t linger on her boobs, whereas they totally linger on Gaston’s biceps. And the Beast’s implied biceps.

BROOM They lingered on the boobs of Gaston’s admirers. When they’re at the water pump, the weight of the boobs presses the pump — you didn’t notice that?

ADAM No.

BROOM I was highly attuned to these things as a kid because they were embarrassing to me.

ADAM We were critical of the last movie because Ariel turns into a silent eye-batting thing.

BROOM I was — you guys were kind of annoyed at me for saying that.

ADAM Do we think that Belle’s gesture towards personhood is more convincing here?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Do you want your daughter to grow up like Belle?

BETH Yes. She’s a decent person who likes to read. And she’s pretty. It’s interesting to me that both of her suitors set up these “choose your dad or choose me” scenarios.

ADAM But the winner allowed her to have both.

BROOM That’s right. If you love it, let it go free — or whatever — that’s his moral. Do we feel that the “there most be more than this provincial life” setup is really answered by the rest of the movie?

ADAM Sure. She’s rich, she has a library and a castle.

BROOM By dating a foreigner, by cross-racially dating, does she fulfill her potential as a bright young woman?

BETH What exactly did she want to do with herself?

ADAM All of the movies are about marrying a rich man as the answer to your provincial life.

BETH I got the sense that she just wanted someone to talk to, and in the Beast she found that.

BROOM She wanted to feel that her mind was like other people’s minds. But the Beast is not like her at all. It seems like she’s distracted by this really weird situation, but is that really what she wanted? Didn’t she want to be an inventor herself, somehow?

ADAM She’s got that library like Magneto’s chamber. It has Shakespeare in it.

BROOM There’s no way she’ll ever get the books from the top shelves. It would be too scary to go up there.

BETH The servants would get them.

ADAM The Beast would get them!

BROOM He’s no longer a Beast. And there was no Shakespeare in the original release of the movie.

ADAM I understand that.

BROOM Does it work for you that the Beast is stabbed to death, and then when he’s transformed back, is no longer stabbed to death?

ADAM Didn’t care.

BROOM Does it feel necessary to you that Gaston dies? His evilness ratchets up several notches at the end to earn him a death.

ADAM Yeah. Especially since it’s by his own hand. As it must be.

BETH It felt right and satisfying.

BROOM To me, the moment when he turns to the townspeople and says “we must kill this Beast!” doesn’t feel particularly motivated other than by the sense that we’re reaching endgame.

ADAM Well, he senses that the Beast loves her and that she loves him in return. But I agree that’s a thin reed.

BROOM And why isn’t he interested in the blondes?

ADAM Because they’re too easy.

BROOM He’s a hunter.

ADAM That’s the real message here, girls. And Belle doesn’t have to kiss the Beast to make the spell work. Because the sight of her pressing her lips up against those fangs is too beastly to contemplate. You’ll see, when we get to the adaptation of Hunchback, that they don’t like to have pretty women kissing ugly things, even in the service of literature.

BROOM But I also think that there’s a defensible, substantive reason to change it from “the kiss of true love” to actual love.

ADAM It’s a better message.

BROOM And it’s really about him having to learn to love, to the point where someone can love him. He’s not on a quest to find, like, an emerald.

ADAM I feel like she totally could have kissed him before he released her to get her father, and it would have been fine.

BROOM Yeah, at that point, the viewer is thinking, “why doesn’t she love him yet?”

BETH I felt like, she obviously does love him — why does she have to say it?

ADAM Right. Can’t it tell? I had this kind of dissatisfaction with Groundhog Day. How perfect does that day have to be?

BROOM Any technical comments?

ADAM The first musical cue is haunting to me, and I can’t decide if that’s because it reminds me of the Symphonie Fantastique, or if it’s because it reminds me of Babe.

BROOM Of the Saint-Saëns. It reminds me of another Saint-Saëns, the Aquarium from Carnival of the Animals, which I think you’d recognize if you heard it.

BETH I think that has been ripped off for other movies.

ADAM It sounds like a preview selection.

BROOM I think that opening sequence is one of the best inspirations here. Because that gets used all the time now. There was no storybook opening, but the stained glass serves even better. But then you have to wonder: how many versions of the same stained glass window are there? She’s the same but he’s in a different pose, so is that a whole different window, or what?

ADAM It’s a really economical setup to get across this ridiculous setup about the rose and the witch. The witch who doesn’t come back.

BROOM You think you might see the good fairy at the end, but then it would be like maybe he should go out with her instead.

ADAM I think this is totally satisfying. As a kid I was enthralled by its wide-eyed itselfness.

BETH How old were we?

BROOM Twelve or thirteen.

ADAM I was a dork.

BETH I’m not being judgmental, I’m just surprised.

BROOM It was a big event! “There’s a big new animated movie that everyone says is great! Let’s go see it and find out! Hey, that was really good!”

ADAM And it has no knowingness. That’s why the moment when Chip says “You gotta try this!” stands out, because it’s the only glimmer of ‘tude, if you will, in the entire movie. There will be varying degrees of that, and varying degrees of wholesomeness of that, but that’s all we will find in the most recent ones. I guarantee that when we watch Home on the Range, there will be a lot of that. Seriously, Bart Simpson was not good for American culture.

BROOM Bart Simpson was like that on T-shirts, but not on the show.

ADAM Fine: Al Bundy.

BROOM There was definitely some kind of new vulgarity at that point, but I’m not sure where it came from. As you said, there was a faint glimmer of it in this movie. I think everyone conspired together; I don’t think Bart Simpson or anyone else led the way.

ADAM Well, something happened. There was not a fart joke in this movie. The horse didn’t fart, none of the little kids farted in the tub…

BROOM Le Fou gets stabbed in the ass with scissors!

ADAM And I suppose that guy gets inadvertently converted into drag and runs away.

BROOM He gets turned into a clown.

ADAM But I don’t think that 1992 was materially more wholesome than before or since.

BROOM I think this is definitely more wholesome than the preceding years. This is more wholesome than The Great Mouse Detective and The Black Cauldron, where they seemed like they didn’t give a crap about kids. You can complain about the PC-ization and the slickifying of mass culture that we’re seeing here, but I think that at least most of the thinking about “what should the message to girls be? what’s a responsible way to portray love?” pays off! By making this genuinely a more wholesome movie. I think it absolutely was.

ADAM I think that kids’ culture has gotten more “wholesome” in the sense that it’s safer, but it’s also coarser in a certain way. The Black Cauldron was frightening because it didn’t seem to have a thought as to what children should be watching. Movies today are clean and slick but they’ve got harmless vulgarity in them which is depressing in a different way; it’s not frightening, it’s just stupid.

BROOM I think the main difference between this and the early Disney movies of a similar wholesomeness was that those movies were somehow “open” whereas this felt very constructed, very directed, like a Broadway show. It’s more clearly just a series of displays of stagecraft. It feels a little phony. Just like when you go see musical theater and you hear someone sing one of these stupid songs, and you think, “yeah, but what do you know about anything in life?”

ADAM Do these songs get sung at auditions ever? Would someone sing “Be Our Guest” at an audition, or would that be a little much?

BROOM I think not. It would be too campy. I think these songs are seen as being in a particular camp category.

ADAM But people sing other Disney songs at auditions.

BROOM I think it’s seen as very, very gauche to sing “Part of Your World.” Anyway, my fifteen-years-later feeling was that it holds up pretty well, and is good for kids, and I still like Little Mermaid better.

ADAM Little Mermaid was funnier. This has very little actual humor in it.

BETH Because I’d never seen this before, right now I think I like it better, because it was all new to me.

BROOM Well, I’m glad you liked it, because if you didn’t, the rest of this project would be really rough on you.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM I forgot to talk about how now, having seen Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, I see that this movie is very particularly like that one in many ways. Oh well.

[Due to miscommunication, BETH was not present at the appointed hour for the screening; she watched the movie on her own a few days later and was coaxed into recording a few thoughts independently, without having heard ADAM and BROOM’s conversation. Her comments appear at the end.]

ADAM That was a lot more visually sophisticated than I was anticipating.

BROOM I remembered that about it, so I can’t say it was more than I anticipated. But yes, visual polish is definitely its greatest distinction.

ADAM And yet as a whole it’s distinctly inferior to both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Why? I don’t think it has respect for kids’ intelligence. To me, the dominant mode of this movie is a sort of wiseacre jokiness that really would have appealed to me as an eleven-year-old, but which is not wholesome.

BROOM How much jokiness was there, really?

ADAM All of the Wilbur stuff. A lot of the slapstick comedy. A lot of the Jake stuff.

BROOM Who’s Jake? Oh, the Australian mouse.

ADAM “Who’s Jake?” Exactly. When I was a kid I loved Tiny Toons, and Tiny Toons did that same kind of “wokka wokka! talking fast and using incongruous adult concepts!” — in a way that made me feel knowing, as a child, but was not wholesome or good.

BROOM I hear what you’re saying. But I also think that if I were reading this and hadn’t just seen the movie, I would be getting the wrong impression from you about how witty it was. It wasn’t witty at all. This movie wasn’t like Tiny Toons; it wasn’t full of wisecracks. It was full of things that are just as lazy, though.

ADAM When Wilbur crashes on the roof and he says, “passengers should remain seated until the flight has come to a complete stop!”… I would have cracked up at that, as a kid. Because it’s like a snippet of grown-up life inserted into this ridiculous context. That would have tickled me. But as an adult looking at it, I’m ashamed.

BROOM That’s a problem with a lot of humor, including a lot of stand-up comedy — that they just go for the laugh of recognition of what they’ve co-opted, what they’re sampling. That’s a cheap kind of humor. But I feel like there was a different cheapness at work here.

ADAM Well, there were many kinds of cheapness.

BROOM Yes.

ADAM When Bernard says, “Maybe next time we can take the train,” that’s the most inoffensive and lazy way to signal his timidity.

BROOM I didn’t even understand that line. Is the joke that you can’t take a train to Australia?

ADAM I think that’s the joke, yeah.

BROOM I think you were on the money with your first comment, that the movie doesn’t respect kids’ intelligence. Everything is just trope upon arbitrary trope. So much of childhood is the process of learning these things, and then when you return to them in adulthood you realize, “Oh, it never made sense. No wonder it was hard for me to assimilate as a child!” All these cartoon tropes, these things that always happened, I eventually picked up how they worked, what the standard playbook was. But now it’s no shock to me that so many of those things seemed so quizzical and took so long to become normalized — because they weren’t genuinely meaningful even to the adults making the cartoons.

ADAM The moment when Wilbur says “I’m never doing that!” and then, squawk!, now he’s doing it! — That’s a bit. It’s pleasing to a child not because it’s intrinsically funny but because it’s a bit that you recognize. It’s like seeing a hamburger on the menu at a strange hotel.

BROOM An example that was more central to this movie is this issue of “When is Bernard ever going to find a chance to propose to Bianca?” What is that? Why is that happening? What kind of a problem is that? The only justification for it is that it has happened in other movies. You can trace it back to basic dramatic principles — you know, tension and conflict; challenges creating empathy for characters — but that’s not actually the function that it serves in this movie. Toward the end they sort of retroactively suggest that Bernard needed to prove his bravery or else this more attractive, stronger guy really did deserve to end up with Bianca instead of him. And then of course he proves his bravery and so is now “allowed” to marry her. But the fact that he’d been comically interrupted several times before while trying to propose is really neither here nor there. As a kid watching that, you just pick up on the lazy rhythms that govern such things and you get that it’s all one big meaningless formula.

ADAM There’s also the Three’s Company routine when they’re at dinner — he says “But this is so sudden, don’t you need a gown?” and she says “No, I just need khaki shorts and hiking boots!” and he’s like “What??” I loved Three’s Company, as a kid… but that’s just not a sophisticated or, ultimately, a good-for-you kind of humor.

BROOM Isn’t that in Shakespeare too? Isn’t that just the crossed signals joke? I’m sure that goes back way before Three’s Company.

ADAM But that’s where I knew it from. Chrissie overhears Jack and Janet talking about going to dinner, but she thinks they’re talking about having sex!

BROOM “Hiking boots??” It’s actually surprisingly risque for this movie, if you take it as that. Details like that can end up a little bit out of bounds because they only crop up out of laziness in the first place. Like that second-rate Chaplin routine where the eggs get stolen out from under McLeach’s nose, which felt like it was from another movie. They put it in that one long continuous shot. That was one scene where I felt like the boldness of the visuals crossed over into the actual staging.

ADAM I liked that scene.

BROOM The movie wasn’t generally that interesting about staging, but it did have a lot of visual choices that were obviously considered. It looked cared-for.

ADAM It had a glossiness to it that looked expensive.

BROOM Yes, there was a sheen over the whole thing.

ADAM There was a pastel ugliness to a lot of it. Everything was reflective in a way that was unappealing.

BROOM It had more shadows indicating three-dimensional rounding than any movie we’ve seen yet. And possibly than any to come. But they’re definitely going to keep cranking that stuff — Pocahontas is going to look very bulbous. To me, it gives things a slightly unsavory quality. Everything is supposed to have a tactile appeal, and I feel like, “why? Why should I want to touch that kid’s boots?” or whatever we happen to be looking at that’s so lovingly rounded.

ADAM That’s what what people say it’s like to take Ecstasy. Everything has a roundness to it that’s really…

BROOM A little horny?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM In that Huxley essay where he was on acid, he said that the legs of the table had a transcendent tubularity.

ADAM I think the lowest point in the whole movie for me was when they’re trying to take off in the snowstorm and Wilbur says “Cowabunga!” while drums are going.

BROOM That music cue was really bad.

ADAM I think that even as a kid I could see through moments like that to grown-ups trying to be kidlike for the sake of pulling one over on you. It felt like a Doritos commercial.

BROOM I know you’re particularly sensitive to that. You got pissed off at the vultures in Jungle Book for the same reason. But I feel like if you’re going to go looking for that, you can find it in every inch of this thing. Isn’t it all sort of pandering?

ADAM Yes! That’s why I’m recoiling.

BROOM Okay, but that’s not what bothers me. I would say the part of this movie that was my least favorite was when they fired a syringe into someone’s butt with a rifle. That’s a very unpleasant thing to think about, and I still don’t know why it was in this movie.

ADAM Yeah, but at least the sadistic nurse-mice had a certain novelty. Say what you will about them, but the idea of tittering mice in wimples engaging in medical torture is more genuinely funny than most of the humor here.

BROOM But why was that in this movie at all? Three scenes later, you said, “Oh look, it’s The Rescuers!” because we hadn’t seen the heroes or the main quest in such a long time. We’d been watching a seagull get tortured.

ADAM The “main quest” didn’t consist of anything but modes of transportation.

BROOM The sadism is a thing that’s been running through the 80s, but that will get turned around, right? In The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast and the rest of them, the violence isn’t as offhand as this. That stops here.

ADAM I think so. But that’s because it gets replaced with a kind of faux-nobility. It will be interesting to see if there’s any of it in Aladdin.

BROOM Aladdin is slapstick, but I don’t think its moral compass is so out to lunch.

ADAM John Candy seemed to be directly reprising his role from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

BROOM I couldn’t identify him as John Candy! I’m pretty sure it was Dom DeLuise in the first one [ed. wrong, you’re thinking of this] and it really sounded to me like someone else was doing Dom DeLuise. I guess they’re similar voice types to begin with.

ADAM Introducing him with “Orville’s not here, now it’s Wilbur!” was like Dennis the Menace.

BROOM Like kids in 1990 are really going to remember the exact voice of Orville from 1977. Actually, I guess by then it was the age of video, so consistency mattered more. But still, the idea that kids would remember The Rescuers at all…? Why did this movie happen at all? If they wanted to make a sequel why didn’t they make a sequel to, say, Dumbo? Why on earth would they make The Rescuers Part Deux? And then “down under” of all things? It’s like the special episode of a sitcom where they spin the globe and go to some arbitrary place, just to mix things up.

ADAM It was like the Simpsons episode where they go to Australia.

BROOM Yes. The movie’s very existence is a symptom of the same kind of laziness that was in each scene. And “laziness” isn’t a good enough word for the problem. There’s no there there. It’s like to create the substance of the movie they just used some machine that churns things out. Whereas to create the individual shots, they actually used something much more interesting than what they had used for Little Mermaid.

ADAM But again: although it was superficially attractive, it all looked sort of tinselly, in a way that I found distinctly unappealing. Everything seemed like it was coated in cellophane.

BROOM I’m not endorsing the look, but it did create a point of interest in the movie. “Look at this zooooomy shot we put in here, and now look at this extreme focus-pull effect we put in here…” If you think about Little Mermaid, it doesn’t have very much of that sort of thing; it’s mostly simple, old-fashioned camerawork, which works just fine. I didn’t like it this way. This was your classic polished turd. It was highly buffed nothingness.

ADAM They discarded characters freely and randomly. What happened to the kangaroo friend from the beginning?

BROOM What happened to Frank?

ADAM We never see the international Rescuer assembly again; we never see the mother again…

BROOM Not seeing his mother at the end is a real offense, and I called in advance that they were going to commit it. It’s an offense that we should have to see the “Ma’am, your son is dead” scene and then never get to see any kind of reunion. And when the kid is released from captivity, he doesn’t go home to his mother first before he goes to save the eagle eggs? The movie didn’t take place in a world of people with emotions. Yes, I know: “duh.” But why shouldn’t it? Why should any kid have to watch a movie without a soul? I hated the way Cody looked, by the way. I hated his face.

ADAM He looked like a Toy Story object.

BROOM He looked a little like Lilo will look, but not as clean.

ADAM He looked intentionally de-eroticized.

BROOM I also thought McLeach had been clearly “de-eroticized.” What does you mean by that — you mean if they had just made him a “good looking boy” it would have been creepy to you? Has that been a problem with kid characters in the past?

ADAM No, I don’t know — maybe it wasn’t on purpose. It was just striking to me that he looked like Piglet.

BROOM He didn’t look quite human. He looked like a stuffed boy doll. And McLeach was so awkwardly ugly. His face was okay but his body looked like a milk carton. He was up there with Fagin in ugliness.

ADAM And why did he have a Texas accent?

BROOM For all that it was the point of the movie, the Australianness of it was actually pretty thin. Though they do happen to live right at the base of Ayers Rock.

ADAM It was convenient that their flight arrived right at the Sydney Opera House.

BROOM Those were the two things about Australia that they managed to get in there. And I guess they included Australian animals.

ADAM The non-speaking animals had beady black eyes whereas talking animals had whites to their eyes. It was a weird sort of racial hierarchy.

BROOM Did the mice talk openly to the girl in The Rescuers? When this kid runs into the woods and then a kangaroo says “get on my back!” to him, it was weird.

ADAM It was. No-one was talking, and then the kangaroo spoke, and it was the only voice with an Australian accent, and then none of the other animals spoke after that for like twenty-five minutes.

BROOM All this said: watching it was not as chorelike as a watching movie this worthless ought to have been, because it kept having things to look at.

ADAM That’s true. Every five minutes it paused for some swooping.

BROOM I’m not sure “give it its due” is the right phrase, because I don’t think it’s “due” anything, but… if this had been DuckTales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, for example. we would be much angrier now because it would have given us nothing. I think this regularly gave us something. The backgrounds were pretty bad. The framing I think was pretty good!

ADAM But the visual interest was very nerdlike. I know if I had made an animated movie as a kid, I would have been extremely proud to have made an accurate representation of the New York City skyline, or of the map from Hawaii to New York. And indeed there’s a credit here: “New York City skyline data provided by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.”

BROOM That was in Oliver & Company, too.

ADAM It’s clear they took a lot of pleasure in an accurate, toylike approach. I’m sure all the animals were anatomically accurate. It all had a “collector’s” quality to it, which is not wholesome.

BROOM You’re making a good observation here, and I think it reflects an overarching issue: I think what you’re seeing is a generational turnover in what it means to be animator. The “nine old men,” the guys we saw make Dumbo and Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and all those movies — I think Fox and the Hound was the last one where any of those guys were leads, and they felt old, by that point — those were guys who had come out of a time where there was no “world” of animation. They were guys who knew drawing, and animation was this fresh opportunity to make drawing into acting, and they got to figure out how. That’s the task that got them going. Whereas now, these are second or third generation people who explicitly want to be making cartoons that remind them of cartoons. They’re there because of the older Disney movies. These people probably didn’t have aspirations to be painters — they’ve always wanted to be animators. It happens in any kind of art: the second generation feeds off what the first generation did, not necessarily the spirit in which they did it. And I think that inevitable process of misunderstanding is going to continue — by the time we get to The Princess and the Frog, that’s going to be yet another generation. Those people grew up on this movie!

ADAM That’s going to be weird when we get to those people, who want to restore the lost art of The Little Mermaid.

BROOM I think the wholesomeness of intention of the first generation will never be gotten back, because you have this huge powerful studio investing huge amounts of money, so of course the people who rise to the lead positions are going to be the ones who are most specifically driven to be at the top of the animation game. You’re not going to get generalists, non-nerds. They’re never going to be, like, smart fashion illustrators that Walt spotted somewhere. I don’t know what those guys’ stories were, but none of them were cartoon nuts.

ADAM Yeah. Maybe I’m imagining it, but this movie felt like it had a whiff of like, the Mary Worth phone.

BROOM Yes! I think one of the most rewarding things about older movies is that they don’t feel incestuous. Whereas almost everything these days has the thumbprints of obsessives on it. In 1994 it was still a novelty that Quentin Tarantino, a film-nerd video store guy, who totally is the Comic Book Store Guy from the Simpsons — for those of you who didn’t know what Adam was referring to — had made a movie. That he was a geek connoisseur and an actual creator. Now it seems like nobody just sort of stumbles into the business anymore. I in my real life in the theater know that there’s just oodles of theater written by those connoisseur people who love theater, and it’s terrible. The things that are the most interesting are by the people who have the fewest aspirations toward that. If you feed yourself only Disney movies, you’ll make a fetishized Disney movie.

ADAM A weird albino Disney movie.

BROOM Which is what you’ve been saying — this movie felt fetish-y.

ADAM The surfaces did.

BROOM The degree that the animators want to lick their own work has increased.

ADAM I was going to say it had sort of a RealDoll feel.

BROOM And I don’t know how that can possibly be turned back. What can a studio do to keep out the people who want to be there a little too much? If they’ve got talent, those people are going to rise.

ADAM You can go down the road to Shrek or The Emperor’s New Groove — those sorts of things seem like they’re inspired by commercials.

BROOM The diameter of the circle that must be traversed before one’s tail can be eaten gets shorter and shorter. I’m led to understand that a big part of the reason Little Mermaid felt fresh is because Ashman and Menken showed up, and guess what? They were not cartoon nerds! They were theater nerds, and theater nerdism was relatively fresh blood for this world. Whereas this movie felt like it was made by people who not only had worked on He-Man but also watched He-Man. I’m not sure what other kinds of blood can be poured into the mix to turn it back.

ADAM It would be interesting to see a Disney movie made by, like, Chris Ware; comic book people. What if a Disney cartoon was made by Marvel comics type people? Or what if you had a legitimate director, like… Alfonso Cuaron?

BROOM I’ll bet that’s been considered and I’ll bet it’s been dismissed because the task of an animation director is so completely distinct from the task of a live action director. Though there was The Nightmare Before Christmas, where Tim Burton didn’t technically direct it because they needed a real animation director, but Tim Burton sort of told them what movie to make. And people love that movie! It’s a weird movie and it has some problems, but it definitely felt fresh.

ADAM There’s also, like, Spirited Away.

BROOM That’s right. I think Miyazaki is as much of a second-generation geek as these people, but it’s filtered through a different cultural sensibility. I think it his work comes out of growing up watching Peter Pan too, but since he’s Japanese it’s all different to him. I guess the real issue is whether you have the craft so under your belt that you can waste it, or whether you have to earn what you’re doing and keep thinking about the underpinnings. I think the people who are a little fresher to the problems involved are forced to think more clearly.

ADAM Well, the upshot is that this felt like a room that had been sat in for a little too long. For whatever reason. I would have liked to say something about gender, but there was no gender of any kind in this movie.

[We read the New York Times review]

ADAM That was not very thought out.

BROOM That wasn’t on the money. And I think the fact that she “remembered” the maitre d’s name from the beginning must mean that she got most of this from looking at the press packet afterward. It didn’t feel like a very engaged review. Vincent Canby puts more on the line. And god bless Bosley Crowther; he wasn’t always right, but he was always for real.

ADAM That review was just a list of things. And what is this about the movie being too dark? I don’t agree with that.

BROOM We said it had a sadistic strain to it.

ADAM But she said the hospital scene was a more lighthearted moment.

BROOM The sadism ran throughout. For the comedy scene to be “we’re gonna get you with a chainsaw!” and for the serious scene to be “I’m gonna lower you into a crocodile’s jaws!” comes from the same careless impulse.

ADAM Itchy and Scratchy’s revenge.

BROOM It’s only appropriate if you have no investment in the characters and it’s just a series of images. Which is what it was, and which is exactly what was wrong with it.

---

BETH The Australian mouse was more appealing than the Bob Newhart mouse. The Bob Newhart mouse is a pathetic mumblebum. There’s nothing appealing about that mouse! And then this dashing safari mouse appears — kids would want that mouse to be her husband. Even at the end, he’s nice about the marriage proposal and gives a thumbs-up.

The hospital scene was my least favorite part of the movie. The scenes with Wilbur felt unnecessary and extraneous, like a distraction, even though at the end he does play a role. It’s like they needed to develop his character earlier on so that we cared later when he was helping them. But that scene made everyone look bad. It made the hot mouse look bad for saying that he needed to go to this hospital, which was like a crackpot hospital.

I did like the opening when they were at that restaurant hidden at the top of another restaurant. It was cool that it was in the chandelier and they had this beautiful view of the city, and it was snowing. That was a nice scene, to me. I didn’t like everything that happened there. I liked where I thought it could have gone, but then it got silly.

The whole bird adventure at the beginning was dumb. It really was ridiculous. We were working with nothing, and that’s what was given to us. You have absolutely no sense of where things are going to go from there. Then they go in a pretty pedestrian direction.

I liked the CGI at the beginning with the 3D scenery and the big zoom. It reminded me of 3-D WorldRunner. But I had questions right away about why it was in Australia. The kid in the movie didn’t have an Australian accent. His mom kinda did. Did they really use Australia very well as a setting? No! They didn’t do anything with it.

The sidekick, the minion, the lizard thing, was, you know… standard.

The breaking out of jail scene was really long. It bothered me that the little creature could easily have just gotten out, and that no one suggested that to him.

I thought it was funny that there was a “wanted” posted nailed to a tree. In the middle of the forest? This took place in modern times!

[Bonus link: Siskel & Ebert review]

ADAM I thought I was going to be blown away by how this looked — and it looks fine — but what I was actually impressed by was its wit. Which surprised me. I did not remember that, and I was tickled.

BETH I didn’t think it looked that amazing either, though it wasn’t bad — but it was very tight. The music was good, the story was good, and it felt like everyone working on it was excited by the idea of an under-the-sea movie. They were very inventive in coming up with fun things to animate.

ADAM There were a whole bunch of visual touches that were really pleasing to me. When Sebastian is creeping into Triton’s chamber, the camera pushes toward him and then suddenly leaps even further at him. Or I liked the way Sebastian’s eyes would bulge out just for a second. Things like that were actually funny! There was even redeeming humor in the turgid romantic parts.

BROOM I think that all of the movie’s greatest strengths were in what we would attribute in a live-action movie to “directing.” I’m not sure enough about how the process works behind the scenes to know whether the people named as directors here are the ones who deserve the credit. Probably they are. But probably a lot of other people do too. There’s a documentary out now about the process of reviving Disney in order to make this movie, and I’d be interested to see how that came about. Anyway, its new strengths were all to do with actually delivering the story and the entertainment and making it all work. Because, really, that’s what had been lost. The Fox and the Hound had a perfectly good story idea, and it looked pretty enough, and they had all the basic talent they needed — but it didn’t have any force of storytelling.

ADAM Or character.

BROOM Yes, but in movies like these where you only get about twenty seconds to establish any given character, characterization really has a lot to do with finessing individual moments. Every moment in this movie had been thought about and was smart.

ADAM The comic minor characters were funny without being just, like: “hey, it’s the French guy!” (except for the cook). Like Sebastian, and the seagull, and Grimsby — they were all pretty smartly done. And the little gag moments actually worked — like when the seagull is trying to sing romantic music and he’s singing badly — I smiled legitimately at a lot of those details. The big setpiece of “Under the Sea,” though it wasn’t as CGI-tastic as it probably would be fifteen years later, was still pretty impressive. And the song is actually pretty challenging for a Disney song. We talked about the Broadway-ification of the big numbers, and certainly “Part of That World” is totally a Broadway song — but you can’t really make out all of the lyrics to “Under the Sea” unless you’re really listening.

BROOM There were a few words I only heard now for the first time.

ADAM And the Jamaican style of the music could be hard for a little kid.

BROOM But it is definitely the Broadway version of that kind of song. I thought the whole movie was done very much like Broadway. At the very beginning, they sing one verse of “I’ll tell you a tale of the bottomless blue…” and then right at the end of the phrase, the prince comes in talking: “What a beautiful day!…” That kind of structure, where a song starts and then goes into a vamp while someone does expository lines, is Broadway. We haven’t seen it in a Disney movie before. I’m not sure anyone had seen it in a kid’s movie before. I think Howard Ashman, the lyricist, showed up and said “this is how these things are done.” He had a big part in that, so I’ve heard. There’s a very particular way that songs and lines play on Broadway, and it’s something that this movie did consistently and with confidence. And not just the songs; I felt like all of the storytelling beats were from that same school, and done exactly right so that you could just lap it all up easily. Triton destroys her little grotto and then as that’s ending, of course we pull back to see Flotsam and Jetsam waiting for the next scene. And from there they take her straight to the witch, and from that scene she gets deposited right on the shore… and so on and so on. Each thing feeds into the next one exactly as it should. It takes all kinds of story work to pare things down until they work that way.

ADAM And — to use one of your terms — there’s no business. No stupid stuff like “Flounder’s really shy around girls!”

BROOM That’s right, there was no business for its own sake — again, except for the French chef scene. But that scene is so blatantly that sort of scene, and it actually sort of telegraphs it and says, “here we go! let’s have fun with this.” When he sings “Now I stuff you with bread / it don’t hurt, ’cause you’re dead!” — that felt hilariously subversive when I first saw it. I remember that my family laughed hard at that. That lyric makes no sense except for as a wink to the audience, and that the scene was willing to be on the level of winking to the audience felt like a huge leap forward in sophistication for kid’s movies. “They know that we know what this scene is about, and we can all enjoy that together!” That was very exciting.

ADAM Beth, as a little girl watching what is probably the pre-eminent little girl’s movie of our lives… what did you think? As I ask this, your red hair is shining in the light and you’ve wrapped your legs up in a blanket, so it seems apropos.

BETH I think I was a little older than the target age for being obsessed with this movie. I mean, I liked it, but I was already moving out of the Disney phase. This was the last one I saw. Seriously, you guys, the last one — everything after this is going to be new to me. But I did like it.

ADAM I feel like I’ve often heard people say, “The Little Mermaid was so anti-feminist, and they really were trying to get out of that as they moved forward into the later movies,” but in fact, she’s exactly as spunky as Belle or any of the other heroines. She evades a shark and tricks him into getting stuck in an iron hoop; she has the balls to sign away her life on a contract. She’s just as spunky.

BROOM Well, I think the essence of the feminist objection would be that “spunk” — in some vague sense of “does she have the wherewithal to evade a shark in a cartoon chase” — is not what a girl should aspire to. It’s not an actual personhood. As we watched I was thinking a lot about the princess fetish that the Disney corporation has developed. Moreso than Cinderella, this movie is the exact performance of the little girl’s fantasy, which is that you can go and get the prince and be a glamorous grownup and live happily ever after and that you don’t have to do or know anything. Ariel doesn’t have to do or know anything in this movie. “She’s better than I thought,” Ursula says angrily when she sees her through the crystal ball… even though she hasn’t done anything. There’s a prince pacing around saying “I’m going to find that girl and I’m going to marry her!” and then she shows up and he says reverently “you look wonderful tonight!” That’s it. She has no agency at all during the entire getting-the-man part of the movie. She has no agency basically at any point after she makes the terrible, terrible decision to sign away everything in her life.

ADAM The terrible and extremely brave decision to sign away everything! And her lack of agency is explained by a plot point, which is that she doesn’t have a voice!

BROOM But she doesn’t respond to that as a challenge. She doesn’t come up with a scheme.

BETH She’s so enthralled with the human world. She doesn’t have time to come up with a scheme — she’s enjoying everything.

BROOM I know. I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with it. But the movie could have a different thing to say about this fantasy if she showed up and thought, “even though I can’t talk, I know what I’m going to do: I’m going to do X or Y or Z.”

ADAM Tap-dance.

BROOM Something. But that’s not what happens.

BETH But she’s not able to do any of that stuff.

BROOM She has no ability to do anything. Sebastian does things, and Buddy Hackett does things, on her behalf — they set up the whole “Kiss the Girl” scene — whereas she just sits there waiting for him to kiss her. And he’s gonna, because she’s pretty. And that is the extent of the dream that it offers girls.

ADAM Yes it is! He is very handsome.

BROOM He is one of the most handsome of the princes.

BETH He is.

ADAM Ursula, too, I feel more sympathetic to than I might on one of my strident days. Yes, she sort of deals fast, but she really does spell it all out for Ariel, up front. She’s power-mad, but she’s totally legit.

BETH Except that she sabotages Ariel by showing up in disguise.

ADAM That’s not mentioned in the contract! I think Ursula is very on the level about the deal.

BROOM As a lawyer, you gotta respect Ursula the sea witch. But let’s step back and talk about the figure of Ursula, because I think this is the culmination of the conversation we’ve sort of been having about Cruella de Vil, and Madame Medusa, and Maleficent… all the way back to “Mirror, mirror on the wall.” Why do we have to see Ursula putting on lipstick and shaking her boobs? What does this have to do with her evil?

BETH and ADAM (sputtering defensively)

BETH But I enjoyed seeing her put on lipstick!

ADAM Yeah, she put it on with that cool… thing!

BROOM She happens to have a vanity right there in her living room. Also — and I hate this kind of analysis, but — she comes crawling out of a big vaginal conch shell. Am I right?

ADAM I mean, I was trying to be counter-intuitive. I would normally be totally with you on the Ariel analysis and the Ursula analysis. I think I just liked Ursula’s personality a lot.

BROOM In neither of these cases am I saying that a movie should not be made this way. My defense of such a movie would be: there are many facets to human-hood and womanhood and manhood, and you can’t learn them all from The Little Mermaid! These are some of them. Sometimes vain people can be manipulative. In the scenes with Ursula, in fact, it seems like what’s going on is that she resents the beautiful people. If Ursula got on a psychiatrist’s couch and cried, it would be about how she’s ugly, right?

ADAM Yeah. Or that she’s fat.

BETH She’s just unloved.

BROOM Well, for whatever reason she’s actually unloved, she thinks that she needs to be sexy, right?

ADAM I don’t know. When she was putting on the lipstick it felt very much like Lauren Bacall “getting down to business.”

BETH She didn’t feel like she was trying to be sexy, to me.

ADAM It’s like watching Miranda Priestly get dressed.

BETH She made a joke about “wasting away.”

ADAM She used to live in the palace, but something happened.

BROOM Wait! When does she say that?

ADAM Right at the beginning. “When I lived in the palace, we had feasts,” or something like that.

BROOM Fascinating! I’ve never processed that!

ADAM She’s more like a Lucifer character.

BROOM I see, she’s fallen! What do you think happened? When Triton shows up at the end, she fingers the tip of his trident — partially, of course, because she wants it, but it’s also a little bit like a “hello, big boy!” touch. And he’s single, right? In Little Mermaid II we don’t find out that Ursula is her mother, do we? Because we could!

BETH No.

ADAM She’s got that slinky confident quality. And she’s got those lips. To me she was much more like a drag queen than like a woman.

BROOM Yes. She looks like Harvey Fierstein. [ed.: on the commentary, the directors say she was inspired by Divine]

ADAM She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. Through legal trickery.

BROOM And shaking her ass. You cannot deny that a major element of Ursula is that she is — or was — a sexual woman.

BETH Really? I just don’t see her as sexual.

BROOM “AND DON’T FORGET THE IMPORTANCE OF BODY LANGUAGE!!!!!”

ADAM It’s not so much that she’s sexual. She’s seen it all, and she knows how you make it in this world, but that’s just how business is done, with a little vavoom, you know?

BROOM Yes. And she’s the figure of evil in this movie. The world in which we want to live is a happy world where you go on a ride through the kingdom and see a puppet show. Prince Eric is surely going to have sex with our heroine but it’s not that kind of sex.

ADAM It’s the sex of true love.

BROOM This issue that the kiss has to be the Kiss of True Love is just a throwaway. If he had kissed her in the lagoon, would that have counted? They’re singing that he should kiss her because there’s only one way to find out if she likes him — that can’t be the Kiss of True Love, if he doesn’t even know yet whether she’ll like it.

ADAM What is the other movie where there’s True Love’s Kiss? Oh, I’m thinking of Enchanted. We should watch that at the end of the series.

BROOM What would you say is essence of the princess fantasy? Do you guys agree that this movie codified it?

BETH I think it’s exactly what you said: that being pretty is enough.

ADAM I think of the essence of the princess fantasy as being that beautiful crystals are swirling around you and you become something else that is effortless and delightful, and afterward everything is easy.

BETH I think it involves waking up and looking in the mirror and finding that you are beautiful and have pretty clothes and that the guy that you like likes you. And that everything is easy, yes.

BROOM So the royalty aspect of it is just a convenient way of summing all that up. It’s not like people actually want to be the queen.

ADAM It’s not about the exercise of state power!

BROOM But is it about that he’s powerful — that your boyfriend is like the king of something, and that’s hunky?

BETH It’s just “how nice it would be to live in a palace and not have to do anything except wear pretty dresses and eat dinner.”

BROOM When that washerwoman in the movie says “if Prince Eric is looking for a wife, I’ve got some very available women right here,” we all go “Ho ho ho ha ha ha! Of course not you hag!”

BETH I think it’s really about being the fairest of them all.

ADAM I kept thinking about Mr. Weasley as I was watching this movie. You know, he’s fascinated by Muggles, and he doesn’t understand how Muggle technology works, and everyone else is like “Humans are dangerous and unpredictable!” and he says “You just don’t understand them!” And he also has vibrant red hair.

BROOM You’re right! J.K. stole that. “Want a thingamabob? I got twenty!”

ADAM Ariel’s totally a nerd.

BROOM Well, a hot nerd.

ADAM She’s into, like, Warhammer figurines. She’s like Belle, actually. They’re both nerds.

BETH Belle is from Beauty and the Beast?

BROOM Yes. You’ll find out.

ADAM Belle’s opening number is about her love of reading.

BROOM And about how provincial her community is. It’s basically about how everyone she goes to high school with is an asshole, and she’s going to go to a fancy school. But her dad can’t afford it.

BETH I don’t know how I felt about Ariel wearing a bikini.

BROOM That’s why I mentioned her hotness. It is not a non-factor in this movie that the protagonist is mostly naked most of the time.

ADAM But she doesn’t know any better. That’s just what she wears.

BETH Some of those shots where she’s swimming up and her boobs are sort of emphasized…

ADAM And how about when the water is breaking on the rock behind her?

BROOM When she gets legs and is naked below the waist and they still show her all the way down below the curve of her hips, that feels like a bit much. I accept the shells when they go unmentioned, but I always felt uncomfortable when the seagull asks her if she got “new seashells” — it turns our attention directly on them and acknowledges that they are a removable item of clothing that is covering her near-nakedness, and not just a part of the character-design — and that always felt inappropriate. And let me explain what I mean by “always” — I have seen this movie more times than any other in this series because it was used as a substitute teacher for middle school chorus by a neglectful chorus teacher, many, many times in sixth or seventh grade. There is not a shot in this movie that isn’t very, very familiar to me.

ADAM But you said there were words you picked out now for the first time.

BROOM Words aren’t a crucial part of movies when you’re a kid. As Beth said the other day when Star Wars was on.

BETH There were also some shots of the side-boob. More than necessary.

BROOM Yes, that’s what I’m saying. She had been drawn with that certain kind of loving care that you need to be careful about managing, whenever animators are involved.

ADAM What do you think about the primacy of music in this movie? I don’t think I had ever thought abut the fact that Sebastian is the royal composer, and music is the way they try to get him to kiss her, and her singing is what draws him to her…

BROOM Sebastian’s efforts to convince her to stay under the sea and to convince the prince to kiss her are both far more compelling music than the terrible score he writes for the royal concert. I always identified Sebastian with Salieri. Sebastian’s eyes and mouth are on a part of the crab that doesn’t exist, anatomically. Every time I see it I wonder why that is. You’d think they’d just have put eyes and mouth on a crab shape. Instead they attached a glutinous mass to him that contains his personality. At first you think that it makes sense, because a clam has a goopy body like that — but a crab is not a clam. It has features already.

ADAM I don’t think I had noticed that.

BROOM As for the role of music… I like that she has a little leitmotif that her disembodied voice sings: “look at this stuff / isn’t it neat.” And I really like the effect when the ghost hands come and take it out.

ADAM And you can hear it coming out, too! How do they do that?

BROOM Regarding the animation: certainly the special effects were better than Oliver & Company, and the character designs were a little better overall…

ADAM But there was some sloppiness.

BETH There were some weird things.

BROOM I would say about one-half of the animation was better than it had been, and about half of it was about the same. We were all struck by the shots where she’s singing her reprise of “Part of Your World,” on the beach and then on the rock, some kind of rotoscoping was going on, and her shape was changing uncomfortably. Her eyes sort of drifted apart and together.

BETH Her body, too. Also, the mouth-matching for her first song wasn’t very good.

BROOM Maybe so, but I think that first song is really effective. I thought, “of course everyone wants to sing this as their audition piece in high school.” The sequence works so well.

BETH It’s a great song.

BROOM It’s a great song for that moment in that movie. When you get to that song, you know it for sure: This movie is going to be better than Oliver & Company. This movie is better than all the other animated movies I’ve seen in this decade. You know it because she’s singing about something.

ADAM Her look changes. Sometimes she looks like a young girl, and sometimes she looks like a drag queen — her lips are too red, and her hair looks like Wilma Flintstone — and sometimes she looks another way… it was uneven.

BETH It seemed like many different people were drawing her and it didn’t all work out.

BROOM What do you know about the original story by Andersen? I know that I found it very unpleasant when I had a little book of it as a kid. She loses her voice by having her tongue cut out of her mouth, and her feet hurt the whole time, and she fails… it’s all bad. Anyway, if not for the source material, would “The Little Mermaid” seem like an appropriate title for this movie? It seems a little quaint.

ADAM When I saw the title screen, I thought that if I had never heard of the movie before, I’d be excited, because a “mermaid” is this exotic thing, but “the little mermaid” sounds friendly and approachable.

BROOM To me the word “little” is like a hundred-year-old European way of signifying that something is for children.

BETH The Teenage Mermaid, it should have been. Teenage Mutant Ninja Mermaid.

BROOM Did you hear, by the way, that the film Rapunzel, due in November 2010, has been retitled Tangled? They could have had the title RAPUNZEL… but they didn’t think it would appeal to boys enough, so they rechristened it… TANGLED.

[conversation ensues about how dumb this is]

BROOM I feel like it’s in this movie’s long-term interest that it is called The Little Mermaid, even though that’s not quite what it feels like, and not, say … Getting Feet. Anyway, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed watching it, and I haven’t felt that in a long time.

ADAM Yes. I liked it for all the right reasons.

BETH It felt very fresh. Very 90s, but fresh.

BROOM And that said, it definitely wasn’t the wholesome, full-bodied thing that the original Disney movies were.

BETH Ursula did eat creatures with eyes. You had talked about the cruelty in the previous movies being a turning point.

BROOM Adam had to ask, “are they dead?” when she suddenly blew up Flotsam and Jetsam. And then little pieces of their meat fall on her. Yes, she blew them up. They are dead.

ADAM And she died pretty graphically.

BROOM The one part of this movie that’s not handled perfectly is that she gets huge and then is impaled on a boat.

ADAM You want them to be hoist on their own petard. It should have something to do with their character. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s inflated herself to this vainglorious size, and somehow she’s undone that way.

BROOM She’s undone only because she’s so distractedly set on blowing up the hot teenager. If she had the presence of mind to look to her side, she could have batted that ship away. And it still seems unlikely that the ship, going so slow, would have impaled her all the way through. It’s not a satisfying ending.

ADAM I feel like there’s another Disney movie where the king gives up his power to save some lesser person, and in so doing imperils everyone, and you realize it’s not a good decision. I don’t know what I’m thinking of. There are a lot of bits in this that are Disney pastiche but don’t feel that way in the moment. As Beth said, the “rescue by animals” scene is old hat.

BROOM That was fine because it was just a comedy bit and not the actual saving moment. Of course, the actual climactic moment was even more secondhand. Her getting big is not justified by anything in the movie. You have to have seen other movies to understand why she’s getting really big at the end.

ADAM It happens again in Aladdin too.

BROOM Not to give anything away. It basically comes from Sleeping Beauty, where she turns into a giant dragon at the end, and is, similarly, vanquished unconvincingly. It would have been better if she had been undone by her vanity somehow; or if her contract had a loophole clause in it.

ADAM Something Shylockian.

BROOM She is Jewish, isn’t she. And from New York.

[we read the review and I begin reminiscing about reading that very review back in 1989, and things devolve]

BROOM For our readership and for our future selves, we should begin by acknowledging the circumstances under which we watched this. We found at the last minute that our Netflix disc was cracked and unable to play, so we watched it on Youtube. It had been illegally uploaded at low resolution, in nine segments, by people who didn’t really care about our viewing experience.

BETH They weren’t thinking about us.

BROOM They weren’t thinking about much.

ADAM But I’m glad that they did it.

BROOM Yes, I’m glad we got to watch it, but the video quality and sound quality were terrible.

ADAM I have to say: this movie had panache.

BROOM I agree.

BETH I actually wish we had seen it in better quality.

BROOM Me too. At first I thought, “Well, it doesn’t matter how we watch this one because it’s just gonna be complete garbage.” But then it wasn’t, and I ended up wishing we could have seen more detail and been more discerning about it.

BETH It wasn’t as bad as the last two.

ADAM The last, like, ten.

BROOM I had been anticipating that we would see The Little Mermaid as a sudden rebirth out of ashes. But I actually saw this as sort of a halfway point, building toward that from where they’d been.

ADAM This is like the Cimabue before the Michelangelo.

BROOM Well, I don’t know about that. I just mean that there was all kinds of stuff going on here that we hadn’t seen in a long time.

ADAM Like it was funny.

BETH Yeah. I mean, in parts it was. And the songs were decent for once.

ADAM There are at least three songs that I am still humming right now. Even if one of them is just the phrase “You and Me Together“…

BETH I felt like they ripped off their own movies, a little bit. Like Lady and the Tramp.

BROOM I was surprised to find myself thinking that of Lady and the Tramp, Aristocats, and this, which all cover the same territory…

BETH You would pick this??

BROOM Well… just that this was more fun than Aristocats. By far.

BETH Oh, yeah. But Lady and the Tramp is better than this!

ADAM There were little touches that were really good, things that they clearly took pleasure in doing right. When Georgette jumps away in fear from Dodger, her mirror wobbles and crashes, even though it could easily have just stayed there.

BROOM I thought everything with Georgette was good. I thought her musical number was a huge blast of adrenaline for the Disney organization.

BETH That number was surprisingly good. Bette Midler was entertaining.

BROOM They’re trying to get back to putting on musicals. Snow White was a musical, Cinderella was a musical — but they’ve really lost their way. Horribly so, by The Fox and the Hound, which is the last time that we had a song. Oh, wait — there were songs in The Great Mouse Detective, but they were really awful and wrong-headed. So now they’re trying to figure out what kind of songs constitute a fun family musical in this era, and here we saw several different styles being tried — the Huey Lewis song at the beginning, the Billy Joel song… And then in the middle of this is the mock-“Broadway song,” and it lights up the screen! That kind of theatrical overkill works with animation. I’m not sure how much it’s really a throwback to where they started — Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo, say, isn’t really a quote-unquote “Broadway number” — though I guess it’s sort of in line with how Broadway numbers were at the time. Anyway, this new showbiz razzmatazz is really a fresh choice for them, and the animators took to it like…

ADAM Like leg-warmers.

BROOM Like leg-warmers to a poodle. And that’s the direction they’re going to go. They’re going to hire Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to do Little Mermaid, I’ll bet, because of this realization that Broadway aesthetics are their future.

BETH But the drawing style was still that sleazy, cheap style, and not what we’ll see in The Little Mermaid. Little Mermaid looks more like Cinderella than it does like this.

ADAM Well, I think Little Mermaid is not going to look as good as we think.

BROOM I think that’s right, though it’s certainly better than this.

BETH Okay, fine, but The Little Mermaid looks wholesome and not sleazy. I actually loved the bad guy in this, but I didn’t think he was appropriate for children.

ADAM This is like our eighth kidnapping of a little girl.

BETH It’s like the fourth in a row, for real! And as a kid who was afraid of kidnapping: duh, no wonder I was! Everything had kidnapping in it!

ADAM …of a little red-haired girl!

BETH Yes! That’s not good for kids!

ADAM Not for girls.

BROOM Well, really scary threats get kids involved.

BETH They tied her wrists up. Everything that I feared happened to that girl. Except that she was okay in the end.

BROOM Were you afraid of black men — slash, dogs — prowling around you?

ADAM Those dogs were pretty negro, in a way that was uncomfortable.

BROOM We always have to make a little effort to try to find some racism to talk about, but those dogs really made me go “whoa! Weird choice for 1988.” But on second thought, it’s not weird for 1988.

BETH It’s New York, you know? They had a Hispanic dog, too…

BROOM They were all diverse stereotypes, it’s true. I felt a little bad for the brunette woman dog, who really didn’t have a role.

ADAM Well, she was black too.

BROOM She was?

ADAM Rita?

BROOM I don’t know what her name was. And I didn’t know she was black. [ed: Adam is right.]

ADAM This is probably the only Disney movie that is self-consciously about New York. The Rescuers starts in New York, but they leave. It’s not really about New York like this was; it doesn’t have three songs like “New York Is Bad!” “New York Is Cool!” “New York Is Glittery!”

BETH This was definitely about a real place in contemporary times.

BROOM Yes, this is their only New York movie. Unless you count Little Toot.

ADAM Or that one… what was it called…

BROOM The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met?

ADAM No.

BROOM You’re lucky I’m here to remember this stuff.

ADAM The one about the 1890s couple…

BROOM Johnnie Fedora. Yeah, that was set in ye olde New York.

ADAM It’s striking to me, as someone who is living in New York and someone who was obsessed with depictions of New York as a kid, that this is not a movie that would be made today. This is a New York full of ethnic toughs, and crime, and graffiti in the subway, and class hatred…

BETH It felt like a pretty accurate rendition of New York as it was in 1988.

BROOM Well, it looked pretty clean. I think the city was a little more dangerous and dirty than they showed it here. Unsurprisingly.

BETH But the cars looked like that, styles looked like that, people looked like that.

ADAM I’m not saying this was inaccurate; I’m saying that it’s really striking that everything is so different now. No one would ever even think to make a movie now where the good guys are like “‘Eyyyy, get outta my way!”

BROOM That image of New York was a running thing for at least two decades. I think of that vibe as the birthplace of Sesame Street. The idea that those loud people on your block, the people that you see out on the stoop: they’re the city, and that’s wholesome. I was used to that as a kid; that’s what I thought New York meant.

BETH It’s like Muppets Take Manhattan-style New York.

BROOM Yeah, where she gets mugged in Central Park and it’s just a gag for atmosphere.

ADAM That happens in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, too. Well, at least that they’re all wary of muggings in Central Park because all of their friends have been mugged. I’m really grateful that that’s not what the city’s like, now! I would not particularly enjoy living in a filthy urban maelstrom.

BROOM You were laughing during the sequence with all the feet at the beginning, when a guy came out at the beginning in high tops and started doing a cool dance in the street, but I kind of enjoyed that part, because it was like, “hey, look at all the different feet from 1988!”

BETH Yeah, I thought they did a good job with that.

BROOM I wish there had been some music there, but I guess there were probably sounds that we couldn’t really hear because of the quality. I feel like we watched this while taking a shower — like it was going on in the other room. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again some day. Of course, we don’t need to gather like this and see it again together.

BETH No, we don’t.

BROOM I thought the most important thing that they’d rediscovered was timing, which I keep saying the movies lack. This one, finally, had a sense of timing. The sequences flowed.

ADAM And did not drag.

BETH It felt really fast, in fact.

BROOM It did go really fast because it didn’t have wasted time in it. It had exactly the same amount of material as — if not more than — The Great Mouse Detective, but it didn’t waste time.

BETH It was maybe four minutes shorter than the average.

BROOM So all this said, about how we were expecting total crap and it turned out to be kind of entertaining… how good was it really? Not that good, right?

BETH Not that good, no.

ADAM Well, it’s probably in the top half, honestly.

BETH How many have we seen?

BROOM This is number twenty-seven.

BETH It might be in the top twenty…

ADAM Well, is it in the bottom fifteen?

BETH I think it might be, yes.

ADAM I don’t know. Did you think that, like, Sleeping Beauty was really all that great?

BROOM I would definitely watch Sleeping Beauty over this.

ADAM That’s just because Sleeping Beauty is like “a claaaassic.”

BROOM This is a good point. Because a lot of what I would prefer about Sleeping Beauty over this is really specific to the era. I keep saying that things seem harsher in the 80s, and this does seem harsher. Sleeping Beauty puts you into more of a comforting place. Though it’s not a perfect example…

ADAM I chose Sleeping Beauty because that one was actually pretty boring.

BROOM But it looked like a million bucks. I mean, maybe this one would have looked like a million bucks if we saw it in high-definition…

BETH No. It would not have.

BROOM The background art had that grainy quality that was popular in the 80s. They gave me a really 80s feel of, like [hums “Alvin and the Chipmunks” theme]. You know how at the beginning of that show they go through a trap door and down a slide in nowhere-space? It all reminds me of that — it’s not fully-conceived space.

BETH There was a slide like that in this movie.

BROOM That’s right, in that factory. What does Sykes manufacture? Not clear.

ADAM Hooks.

BROOM Sykes’s death in a head-on train collision was a little rough for my taste.

ADAM Frankly, his dogs being electrocuted on the subway tracks wasn’t too great either.

BROOM That sequence seemed to me to have been taken from the mine cars in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which came out a couple years earlier. Also, how did the movie Annie end? Don’t they climb up a bridge at night like that?

BETH I don’t know, but the girl was dressed just like Annie.

BROOM And there was a fair amount of Annie in her whole Fifth Avenue life. Do either of you know much about the real Dickens Oliver Twist? Is Fagin just a pathetic schlub beholden to Sikes in the original source? I thought Fagin was the bad guy.

ADAM I don’t know. I thought so too.

BROOM It’s weird that this is an all-dog type of movie, and yet Fagin, Sykes, and Penny are all people.

ADAM Jenny, not Penny. You’re thinking of Inspector Gadget.

BROOM Actually I’m thinking of The Rescuers. Anyway, why did they make Fagin a person? A really ugly person, no less?

BETH That’s something I was thinking: Why would any kid want to watch a bunch of mangy animals and an ugly guy?

ADAM Well, why do you want to read about Jon and Odie? Or Dave and Alvin and Simon and Theodore? Or the man in the yellow hat?

BETH But there’s a benign quality to Garfield that wasn’t true here.

BROOM The only reason I liked reading Garfield as a kid was because it was cleanly drafted. Garfield looked like an icon, like you could click on him.

ADAM Garfield may not be pleasing to deal with, but he’s in control.

BROOM Garfield looks exactly like Garfield, and that’s gratifying. Fagin here was blobby and inconsistent. I really didn’t like looking at his scraggly teeth in his coconut mouth.

BETH He was just dirtiness and ugliness. He was hard to love looking at.

ADAM Do you think Dodger got off the hook for being such a cold-hearted villain at the beginning, when he took the sausages from Oliver? We never really had it out with him about that.

BROOM I wasn’t sure that I liked Dodger as much as the movie liked him.

BETH He was like the Tramp from Lady and the Tramp but not charming.

ADAM It sounded like Billy Joel was trying to do the voice of the Tramp.

BROOM The Tramp knew more. I don’t know what Dodger knew. This was one of those “character movies,” where you get to know a gang of characters, and for the most part they didn’t grow on me. I guess I had some kind of a soft spot for Francis.

ADAM Playing Mr. Belvedere.

BETH Well, I liked the chihuahua.

ADAM Yeah, when I wasn’t cringing.

BROOM To me there was something uncomfortable about his lust for a dog three times his size. Anyway, as I’ve said before, that appeal to character familiarity is a dangerous way to make a movie work: “You love them, don’t you?” I guess I was sort of amused by the scene when he read them their bedtime story and it was something really inane.

ADAM Eh. That was just like Wendy and the Lost Boys. Everything in the movie was a little bit of something else.

BROOM Yes. It was just garbage, but it was garbage with panache. For a change.

BETH So… two and a half stars instead of one and a half stars.

ADAM I have lots of memories specifically of the year 1988. This is a thing we could easily remember doing.

BROOM And yet not a one of us saw it when it came out.

[we read Vincent Canby’s unsparing review]

BETH That was full of residual anger for what had happened to the Disney brand.

ADAM But totally justified!

BROOM Where was he for the past 15 years, then?

BETH Yes, it didn’t acknowledge how long things had been this bad. I think if you were coming to this not having seen a Disney movie in 10 years, you’d be like “what happened?”

BROOM But look, Vincent Canby wrote that review of The Fox and the Hound in 1981.

ADAM Which was a totally cynical, offhand review.

BETH He wrote about Fox and the Hound and didn’t say it was bad?

BROOM He just didn’t really talk about what had happened to “Disney” per se.

ADAM Well, Fox and the Hound does look better than Oliver, doesn’t it?

BROOM I don’t know about that.

BETH Yes, it does. It has a style that’s cohesive with their brand.

BROOM But remember that “big mama” bird? That was awful. I think he was a little harsh on the animation in this one. I didn’t like Fagin but I was okay with several of the dogs.

BETH I think he wasn’t distinguishing between animation and character design. Character design back in Fox and the Hound was more like standard Disney, but then it took a hit and became much more Saturday-morning style.

BROOM Yes. And I don’t know if we’re going to ever get back to where we were.

BETH No, I don’t think they do get that back.

BROOM They just find something new, something suited to the 90s.

ADAM I feel like we’re at… “this could be the start of something good.”

BROOM But that review made me wonder. When he said “how dare they,” I thought, “but this is what they’re going to end up doing. They’re just going to do it better.”

ADAM Well, let’s see what happens when it’s better, and see how we feel about that!

BETH I’m prepared not to like things as much as I thought.

BROOM So: show this to your kids, or not?

ADAM I mean, if it was on TV I’d let them watch it, but I wouldn’t make a point of showing this to them.

BETH Sure, but not until they’re a little older — at least nine or ten.

BROOM To deal with the kidnapping themes.

BETH Yes, and the bad guy.

BROOM That seems a little overprotective to me. It might be a little scary but I don’t think it has its values too screwed up.

BETH I just think it’s a little bit sleazy.

BROOM The closer to the present we get, the less I’m able to feel that there’s anything dangerous in these. They might have their value systems skewed and be ugly and mean-spirited, but they also don’t get at your gut. If Bambi showed the mother being killed, with all the impact that had, and then they followed that scene by telling Bambi, “time to get revenge!” I might feel that that was dangerous because it really sends a message. These don’t have the power to send messages any more. Like, who knows what really happened on Inspector Gadget? I watched plenty of episodes of that, and I’m sure it was full of insensitivity, but who cares? It didn’t go anywhere in me.

BETH That’s much more harmless than this. I felt like this bad guy was a real bad guy. He felt scary like a real person who could kidnap me.

ADAM He was a mobster and not, like, a wizard.

BROOM I liked that the murky underworld that was supposed to be like being down in the fog by the Thames was actually DUMBO. At the time maybe that was a sleazy place.

BETH I already forget: what was the last one called? Sherlock Holmes?

BROOM Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Baby Mouse.

BROOM I think this movie should have been called The Mouse Detective. That’s my line that I planned to say.

BETH Oh.

BROOM Because it’s not that great.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM I have other things to say.

BETH Go ahead.

BROOM I think that it was bad principally in the music and timing departments. I think a lot of what we saw and had to think about would have been bearable had it been done tightly, but it wasn’t. It also looked slick in that chintzy 80s way, which really detracted from one’s ability to get into the atmosphere. But again, I think the music and timing were the most at fault. There was a certain amount of flair in some of the animation — surprisingly so: Ratigan went into some crazy, over-the-top postures — and there was a lot of fast-beat stuff with Basil. But it wasn’t serving any greater cause, so it didn’t add up to anything good.

ADAM It’s true. The end, when he was in the gears of the clock, that was pretty flashy and sort of abstract, and they fairly reveled in it, but…

BROOM Famously the first use of CGI in traditional animation. [ed. not so sure about that…]

ADAM Well, it looked good.

BETH It didn’t look like a Disney movie, the same way that The Black Cauldron didn’t.

ADAM It looked like a Don Bluth movie.

BETH It looked like an 80s kids’ cartoon. Does it have a lower frame-rate than other Disney movies? Did they switch to 24 for a few movies and then go back?

BROOM I don’t know. I thought they were all 24.

BETH That was Disney’s point of pride. The reason they looked so lifelike is because they used 36 frames per second, and most studios used 24.

BROOM I don’t know! It didn’t look low frame-rate to me.

BETH It did to me, a little bit. Maybe I was just trying to find a reason for why it looked chintzy.

ADAM It definitely had that thing where objects in the foreground have brighter outlines, which make them look like they’re Shrinky-Dinks on a painted background.

BETH I liked a lot of the backgrounds. I thought the street scenes, the outdoor backgrounds, were nicely done. The indoor backgrounds I didn’t really like, but whenever it was nighttime outside I thought they did a nice job.

BROOM I didn’t. I thought the backgrounds looked over-airbrushed, over-textured in a way that’s not of value to me.

ADAM I would have liked this as a child because I liked anything that was lavishly about travel to a foreign city. This had a queen and Big Ben and Sherlock Holmes and all of the things that England is.

BETH This was way too scary for me as a seven-year-old.

ADAM That’s true, it was very scary.

BETH I don’t think I saw it when I was seven, but parts of it did seem familiar, especially when they were in the toy shop.

ADAM The concept of an evil toy shop is pretty scary.

BROOM As we were saying during that scene, though, the music was not at all scary and didn’t seem to support the atmosphere, and Adam suggested that probably it had been intentionally dialed back from something that had been deemed too scary. I’m not so sure, since several times the movie did things that were definitely too scary. What I remember from seeing it in the theater at the age of seven was that once the bat had stuck his face into the camera in the second minute of the movie…

ADAM The movie had three terrifying bat reveals! That, and then in the baby carriage, and then when he’s dressed as Olivia.

BETH I think that one was the worst.

BROOM The one at the beginning where the face filled the screen was the worst for me then — anyway, once that had happened, I was on edge for the rest of the movie.

BETH And rightfully so!

BROOM Because you know what they’re capable of: something ridiculously cruel.

ADAM And they do it over and over.

BETH And the dolls were very scary to me, too, so any time the dolls broke, or parts of dolls came off… ugh.

BROOM The reason the movie feels bad is because that kind of evil, that kind of eerie, otherworldly scariness, had nothing to do with this plot. Ratigan is basically a comic character, and his plot is to build a robot queen that looks obviously like a robot; there’s nothing scary actually going on.

BETH Well, he’s a kidnapper, and I was so afraid of being kidnapped, as a kid.

BROOM Well, then that opening scene, with a home invasion, is pretty brutal.

BETH That was like my worst fear as a child, that some bad guy was going to come and take away my family.

ADAM I would like to propose that we read this, as a text, alongside The Naked Gun. Because… I don’t know, the monarchism, and, uh…

BROOM They both involve juxtapositions of The Manchurian Candidate on to the Queen of England.

ADAM That’s right. But also… they both have a sort of quintessential 80s feel that’s hard to put your finger on. I don’t know — is there more to this than that, or am I just… ?

BROOM I really don’t know, but I would love to hear it if there is!

ADAM I hadn’t really worked it out — it just occurred to me. It’s been a while since I saw The Naked Gun, so it’s hard to say.

BROOM Which is also ostensibly a detective movie but not really. When I was a kid, the appeal of this movie was that it was going to take place in fog and be about following clues around. I loved “mysteries,” any Encylopedia Brown-type stuff. But the clue-following in this movie doesn’t really gratify that.

ADAM There’s just that there’s that hound, which is not really clue-following, and then just silliness, like “oh, this note comes from Ratigan…” That’s not really a clue that you could be expected to follow.

BROOM But I probably did enjoy that, because a note is clearly “a clue.” Pick it up, it’s “a clue!”

BETH There’s also the chemical stuff.

BROOM Right, where he discovers that the paper has salt water in it, although that was a little bit obscure for my taste. “There’s only one place where the sewer meets the river!” That seems unlikely. What I do remember enjoying as a child is the great escape sequence, when they’re in the Rube Goldberg trap toward the end. I liked the humorous touch of that cheesy song going while they’re about to die, though the movie sort of cried wolf by already having given us some other cheesy songs that weren’t intended to be “cheesy songs.” But it was still effective as a comic touch. I remember appreciating, then, that the logic of how they stop the machine — by closing the trap on the marble — was within the terms of the mechanical possibilities that I’d been given to imagine, when my mind was racing thinking “what should they do?” It was very satisfying that the solution was a thing I genuinely could have thought of, but hadn’t.

BETH The cabaret dancer was a little too sexy.

BROOM That was a gratuitous sequence. That woman was not a character in the movie. And yes, her ass was inappropriate.

BETH That she took her clothes off was completely inappropriate. And then saying “I will do anything you want.” Of course kids won’t get that, but — what? That has no place in this movie.

BROOM The two other songs were by Henry Mancini. That song was written and performed by… someone else.

ADAM Melissa Manchester.

BROOM It was totally extraneous to the movie. It didn’t even add to the atmosphere, because it didn’t belong in that atmosphere. At a sleazy sailor’s bar?

ADAM It was interesting that there was sort of a female burlesque, because this movie was a lot about vamping and camp. There was both a vampy evil and a vampy good at the same time. You know, Dawson with his little gold hoop earring and dry sherry is kind of like Smee.

BROOM Oh, yes — I think that was supposed to be a sort of Smee costume that he was wearing. This movie had more in-house joking and self-love than we’ve seen yet.

ADAM It had that Dumbo doll.

BROOM Bill the Lizard, from Alice in Wonderland, was in Ratigan’s entourage.

ADAM Anyway — Ratigan is pretty gay, too. “Oh, I love you in disguise!”

BROOM Vincent Price was not in fact gay, right?

BETH No, but he acted pretty gay.

ADAM I don’t really have a thesis here either, but… given that around the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptation, Robert Downey Jr. joked on a talk show that they were homos…

BROOM I heard the joke was also sort of in the movie.

ADAM Well, there’s just a lot of homo-eroticism that sort of gets teased to the surface. Now in this, they were pretty studious about making Basil of Baker Street not gay. He’s very masculine and just sort of a grump, as opposed to a fussbucket.

BROOM I appreciated that, given the Disney standards, they tried to make him at all unstable in a Holmesian way, instead of just a standard-issue hero. It didn’t add up to very much, but at least they tried. But I’m really scrounging to try to see it on its own terms…

ADAM I probably would have enjoyed this just fine as a kid, but it’s just a nothing. There’s nothing here.

BROOM I don’t think it’s right. I wouldn’t show this to my kids.

BETH Yeah, I don’t think I would have enjoyed it and I don’t think I would show it.

BROOM It gets a lot of things wrong. Those song sequences are so wrong-headed.

ADAM You’re really hung up on the music. Is this the first Disney movie where we’ve seen a murder?

BETH I thought that too!

BROOM No, because we commented on this in Peter Pan, when Captain Hook shot one of his underlings offscreen and he falls from the rigging.

BETH Well, that was a long time ago.

ADAM Yes. They’ve been few and far between.

BROOM The drunken mouse here was pretty harsh.

BETH It was upsetting.

BROOM Pointlessly so.

ADAM I remember how stunned I was as a kid when the villain in Roger Rabbit puts the poor shoe into The Dip.

BROOM I think that was a tough scene for a lot of people.

ADAM Kids didn’t have to look at that in the 40s.

BROOM It seems so obvious that it’s not worth saying, but I want to say it: there’s something more cruel about 80s stuff for kids. There’s an insensitivity — an inhumanity in it.

BETH I like “insensitivity” more, because I think the people making this stuff were just not sensitive to the fact that their ideology wasn’t acceptable for kids.

BROOM But it was “acceptable” for kids!

ADAM Is that because we’re coming out of the Kramer vs. Kramer, Paper Moon era, where childhood wasn’t venerated the way that it was 15 years later?

BROOM I don’t think it’s so much about childhood; I think it’s about the coarsening of culture.

ADAM But it dials back in 10 years. You won’t see this kind of insensitivity in 90s movies. And indeed children today are sort of coddled by comparison.

BETH The kids who were teenagers in the 70s are the people making these things.

BROOM Well, first of all, consider that it’s the same people making this who are going to make the Disney Renaissance movies after The Little Mermaid. It’s the same team. And in fact you can see a lot of their gestures here.

ADAM But the culture shifts. You know, Park Slope mommies wouldn’t let their kids… I feel like there’s a coddling of children today that wasn’t as present in the 70s and 80s. There was coddling in the 50s, and then there’s a change around our childhoods, and then it changes back.

BROOM Well, you’re right that there’s a coddling, but I’m not sure I’m willing to accept that there isn’t still an unkindness in movies now. I think that in Mulan or whatever, the most willfully PC movie, you’re still going to see bad guys slicing up good guys, as a way to up the stakes. And of course in Snow White the queen sends the huntsman to cut out her heart — of course that’s also cruel and difficult to take, but…

ADAM But you don’t see this in Cinderella or Alice or Sleeping Beauty, in that period.

BROOM I think the key for me is that in Snow White when she sends him to cut out her heart, or in Cinderella when she takes the key and cruelly locks her in her room, or in Sleeping Beauty where she’s completely terrible, the point is that they’re terrible, and you’re supposed to be horrified by it. Whereas here it’s sort of serving the plot explication, like, “then we’ll show he’s a bad guy by having him kill someone.” It’s not part of the main emotional journey of the movie, and it’s the casualness of it that feels less sensitive. Like in The Black Cauldron, at the end, the bad guy’s body is graphically torn to shreds by the evil power — that was just there as, like, coolness. Our horror at that doesn’t serve the story — the kids aren’t even necessarily supposed to experience horror at that. It’s that kind of rough-play without expectation of any particular emotional reaction that is saddening to me. And I don’t think that that’s gone away. Though I do think there has been a response — when you say that there’s coddling now, I guess that’s right, and it’s in response to what I’m talking about, but it doesn’t actually see it for what it is and address it directly.

ADAM Have we seen a rash of child-napping in these movies that will later go away? Like here, and in The Rescuers, and in… uh… well, the pig gets kidnapped in The Black Cauldron. There isn’t that same theme in the recent ones, as far as I’m aware.

BROOM There is in The Rescuers Down Under, I believe, because it’s another Rescuers movie. Another example of this direction I’m talking about: in Bambi, when Bambi’s mother is killed, it’s the turning point in Bambi’s emotional life, and the movie and you have to sit and deal with that. In The Fox and the Hound, when his mother is killed similarly right at the beginning, it’s like “… okay, so, his mother is killed, and now what’s this little guy gonna do?”

ADAM It doesn’t have the same kind of gravitas.

BROOM They don’t believe in emotional gravitas anymore, so when they do this stuff… When Snow White’s in the woods, it’s scary because that’s the scariest moment in her life! It’s not just like “let’s do a scary toy shop sequence.” The toy shop didn’t have to be the scariest scene in this movie — it was arbitrary. It wasn’t actually a doomed or haunted toy shop. It was just a toy shop, and someone just decided that would be the “scary” scene.

ADAM I appreciate what you’re saying. The horror has become casual and atmospheric and just a device, as opposed to being part of your emotional maturation as a viewer.

BROOM I think that what the Disney movies have lost, and what I’m curious to see whether I feel that they do get it back — because I’m not sure they’re going to get it back as much as they want us to think — is that emotions are at the heart of it.

ADAM As opposed to caper and sequence…

BROOM Just “makin’ a movie work.” Even in Cinderella that I accused of being totally materialistic, it is clearly about your hopes for Cinderella, that she should get what she wants. Will she get what she wants? Why does she have to deal with this injustice?

ADAM Wait for Lilo and Stitch, my friend!

BROOM I’m not sure! I’m really not sure whether those will seem more superficial or not.

ADAM Well, Hercules and The Emperor’s New Groove will strike you as more superficial.

BROOM Those aren’t in the running. Those are the equivalents of The Three Caballeros.

ADAM I’ve said my piece.

BETH Me too.

BROOM So, next up is the end of the line for the shitty ones: Oliver & Company.

ADAM That’s not true: The Rescuers Down Under follows The Little Mermaid.

BROOM That’s right, but I don’t know that The Rescuers Down Under is as bad as this.

ADAM And this was not as bad as some other things that we’ve seen.

BROOM I think that The Fox and the Hound was a real low point, despite having a more interesting story than this. This story was really stupid — stupider than The Rescuers, I daresay.

BETH I was pretty bored watching this.

BROOM I think the main thing that this didn’t have that they will get their groove back about was a sense of…

ADAM Panache?

BROOM Yes! I think that if they had rescored it and cut out extra frames… there were places where we’d see reaction shots and they’d go on twice as long as they needed to and ruin the pacing of the scene. Like at the beginning, when the girl says “My daddy’s gone missing!” and Basil says “No time for that!” and then we see her look sad for like three seconds. That mistake was made many times over. I could picture an animator at his desk with an assignment: “dejected look,” and then he works all day at the “dejected look” shot in and of itself. It’s someone else’s responsibility to make that flow with everything else, and that flow was not there. And Henry Mancini really sucks. It’s hard for me to say that because he’s a great, and I love that Touch of Evil soundtrack.

BETH He was old by this time.

ADAM Yes. This was like seeing Van Cliburn in 2000.

BROOM Right, when I saw him at Tanglewood. Oh, were you there too?

ADAM YES! You always say that!

[The original Times review is read]

ADAM That was awful. That was bad and wrong. That was an embarrassment. It just goes to show you: probably we all could get jobs as writers if we wanted.

BROOM In the 80s.

ADAM It was like it was written in an hour.

ADAM That felt like a He-Man cartoon.

BETH Yes, but a pretty nice one.

ADAM It felt like a He-Man two-hour special.

BROOM It was higher budget than He-Man ever was; it was the content that felt similar.

ADAM Do you remember Skeletor?

BROOM Of course. The horned king looked exactly like him. Which came first?

BETH Skeletor was earlier.

ADAM It also had the feel of an eighties cartoon in that the backgrounds felt like watercolor and the action felt like shrinky-dinks, pasted on.

BETH The backgrounds were a lot nicer than I thought they would be. I was really expecting this movie to be a lot uglier.

BROOM Chintzier.

BETH “Chintzier,” yes, because actually it was really ugly; or at least it had a lot of ugly things in it. And scary things.

ADAM Right, just like Snow White. I mean, we like that.

BETH Yes, but it was scarier than Snow White.

BROOM It wasn’t scary in an old warm-hearted “being scared is fun” way. It was scary in an 80s way.

ADAM Like, Freddy Krueger scary?

BROOM Sort of a Steven Spielberg scary — like Poltergeist. Or like Raiders of the Lost Ark, which it was very much like. It was! The effects around the cauldron were almost the same. The plot was really very similar. Except for the pig.

ADAM The pig was more like Frodo Baggins.

BROOM No it wasn’t!

ADAM No, it wasn’t, but the plot did feel like a Lord of the Rings knock-off.

BROOM There had been that Lord of the Rings animated movie in the 70s, right? I think that other people had beaten Disney to this world of adult, “serious” fantasy animation., and here Disney was venturing in that direction. It was certainly very different from anything that had come before. We’re really in an entirely different cultural territory here.

ADAM It was sort of charming. I mean, all eighty minutes I was awake. There were always things happening; there were no digression caterpillars.

BETH That’s true.

BROOM Yes, but it was confused about drama. A lot.

ADAM Yes: it had the climax in the first twenty minutes, and then it just kept climaxing and climaxing.

BROOM What would you say was that early climax?

ADAM When they escaped from the castle.

BROOM I guess. I basically understood what the progression of events was supposed to be, in the scheme of a movie like this. I meant more that there were a lot of sequences where the tone was confused, or where the music was a little confusing. Like, it was dark and foreboding right at the beginning, when he was still just innocently playing in the Shire. And then it was gloriously magical when they were basically meeting the Smurfs. Those weren’t the right choices.

BETH Was this rated G? That woman’s boobs, and all the beer and wine…

BROOM It was PG. But even so, the degree of horror still seemed high. The horned king’s face coming at you, and all the evil magic effects. It was really an effects-oriented movie.

ADAM They really did an excellent job on the green ectoplasm coming out of the cauldron. It was like Ghostbusters ectoplasm.

BETH All the special effects seemed lovingly done, like the backgrounds. The layouts, too — the actual design of the shots.

ADAM The way that the Fair Folk glowed.

BETH I thought that was really nice and atmospheric.

BROOM There were a lot of backlighting effects like that. The movie was really an effects showcase, whereas there have been almost no effects in any of the recent movies. Just one movie ago, in The Fox and the Hound, it really felt like they were trying to get through with the least possible animation, whereas here — uniquely, for the first time in several decades — it felt like the animators were doing something that they found exciting. Which is not to say that the final product was so great, but it certainly felt enthusiastic.

ADAM I had that feeling some in The Rescuers.

BETH Really? When?

ADAM I don’t know, in the swamp.

BETH With that, I thought they might have been having some fun but they weren’t necessarily really into it.

ADAM So what would you say was the last truly excited animation? Sleeping Beauty?

BROOM Yes, I think that might be it. And this movie had some things in common with Sleeping Beauty.

BETH The princess kind of looked like Sleeping Beauty.

BROOM This was the first time we’ve seen those really big 80s eyes.

ADAM They had a sort of manga quality. You know who she reminded me of? Luna Lovegood.

BROOM Because she didn’t pay any attention to what he was saying? What did her magic bauble do? What function did it serve? And also, where did it go?

BETH It was there at the end.

ADAM It abandoned them in the middle, but then it came back. This was fine. I totally would have enjoyed watching this as a kid: it had a lot of plot, and I wouldn’t have minded the failure of characterization.

BETH I would have needed to be at least nine.

BROOM I would have been too scared as a little kid.

ADAM I would have liked Gurgi just fine. Even though he was a real sniveling sycophant weirdo. I don’t think he deserved to be redeemed just because he killed himself.

BROOM What is the deal with that character archetype? Which as we said many times during the movie, is Jar-Jar Binks and Dobby, and obviously some relation to Gollum, too. It’s some kind of horrible slave-idiot stereotype, right? They always call the hero “master” and can’t speak good English.

BETH What was the first one?

BROOM It’s some kind of modernization of…

ADAM It’s sort of Stepin Fetchit.

BROOM Yes, that’s it. So why is that here? Do kids like that? Is it simultaneously supposed to be sort of like a kid?

BETH Yes, I think kids can relate.

ADAM Kids can laugh at that and feel superior to that.

BROOM I found it very hard to understand what he was saying.

ADAM I really liked making that voice as a kid! It was really annoying to everyone else.

BROOM There was definitely a lack of characterization, like you said. And it was an all-gimmickry plot — we kept saying how it was like a video game. But it did have a force of conviction behind its superficiality.

BETH I was expecting it to be worse than the worst that we’ve seen, and it was much better than that. It wasn’t the worst by far.

ADAM Not even in the bottom quarter.

BROOM You started off the conversation about The Fox and the Hound by saying that the only thing wrong with it was that it was all clichés. I daresay this was all clichés as well! A different set of clichés that we see far more often, in fact.

ADAM But it wasn’t the same kind of clichés.

BROOM I know! It was a whole new stock of clichés. Like you said, the same stock drawn on by He-Man, which was all about clichés eating each other. And in the course of this series, that change in type was refreshing to us. But I think that’s just because right now this set of clichés happens to feel new, not because these clichés are any more worthwhile. I think in the long run they’re probably less worthwhile.

[we read the New York Times review but by the time we’re done, we’re already gearing up to watch the State of the Union and have lost focus]

BROOM That was not very good.

ADAM The thing that was bad about it was just that it was composed of nothing but clichés the whole time.

BETH That was one of the things that was bad about it.

BROOM Yeah. In fact, I think that was the thing I minded the least. The thing that I thought was bad about it was that it was not well done.

ADAM All right. Tell us the ways you think it was poorly done.

BETH In every respect.

BROOM It’s boring to have to list all the ways.

BETH I thought the color choices were strange and off in many of the scenes. I thought the outlining was weird — sometimes there were glow-y parts on the tops of the bodies that didn’t make sense. The zooming was also a problem.

ADAM It did sometimes have that depressing stationary effect that you used to see on The Smurfs.

BETH It looked like a bad Saturday morning cartoon. I know we’ve said that about something else recently.

BROOM We keep speculating that it has to do with budgets, but it really just has to do with planning, directing. The timing wasn’t right, the storyboarding wasn’t right.

ADAM The plotting was terrible.

BROOM The plot had problems that we’d seen before. I complained about Cinderella that we watched the mice for too long…

ADAM Here it was that caterpillar.

BROOM Just business for business’s sake.

BETH We had to watch them walking through the snow for a long time.

BROOM My only real thought about this movie is that it wanted to be Bambi. A lot of the recent ones seem to have been taking older ones as models to some degree, and this was clearly built on the Bambi model. And I think this actually has a more promising story than Bambi itself, which was just sort of about the circle of life without any more particular arc. This movie had a fairly interesting theme at its center. But it was presented with no artistry. There really were several times during the movie where I thought, “you know, this scenario could turn out to be interesting, or even moving!” But then they just didn’t have it in them. I felt like they just weren’t smart enough to do it.

ADAM It had a lot of weird — I know I’m always the person who says this —

BROOM Yeah, this one had it.

ADAM It had a lot of weird gay valences certainly, but it also had weird racial overtones. You know, this is usually the story about the slave boy and the massuh’s son, meeting on the road twenty years later and they won’t acknowledge each other, and cue the violins. The fact that it was set in the South, and the fact that it had a just-barely-Mammy owl character…

BROOM Is that story you just described something real? I don’t know what that’s a reference to, the slave boy and the master’s son.

ADAM It’s in Roots, isn’t it? I feel like I’ve seen that in several places.

BROOM I haven’t seen Roots. I thought this story was more like “two houses, both alike in dignity” — I thought it was modeled on more of a star-crossed lovers type of story, where they’re supposed to hate each other but they don’t. But of course Romeo and Juliet break the code, whereas these guys grow up and learn the code and then have to live by it.

BETH Yeah. What other stories are like that?

ADAM It’s in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, isn’t it?

BETH Yeah. It’s a common kid’s story, I guess.

BROOM I don’t think it is. It’s not a good message for kids. In a lot of ways it’s the least hopeful message. “Life is going to constrain you, and you should be ready for life to pull you away from the things you actually love.”

BETH But is that the final message? No.

BROOM What is the final message? I feel like this story deserved a tragic ending, but they didn’t have the guts for that, so it ended on a nothing note. I mean, were they reconciled or not?

BETH Yeah, they were.

BROOM I don’t think so.

BETH Well, they weren’t reconciled, they were just…

ADAM It was like when the Indian chief and the cowboy make a hand signal to each other over the rock just before they part in dignity but in separation.

BROOM Yes. They are not friends, but the dog will never kill the fox. Which is a wimp-out ending, because if he won’t kill him, might they not be friends? Apparently not.

BETH It’s a mixed message at the end, because the dog is thinking about what they said to each other about how they would always be friends.

BROOM Was the dog thinking that, or was it just echoing through the ages?

BETH That’s a good question.

ADAM I think the dog was thinking about it. The dog has a sad ending! He has to live with Amos and Chief, and there’s no girl dog for him.

BROOM For us to sympathize with both of two characters from different worlds, they needed to make the different worlds sympathetic, but they made the dog’s world “bad.” Hunters are bad. So when he becomes assimilated to his own world, he becomes a stranger to us.

ADAM He’s like Rolf.

BETH He is just like Rolf. Good one.

BROOM Except Rolf shouts! Rolf doesn’t do anything remotely heroic. He calls the cops. Rolf is lost, and this dog is not. But that’s how this should have ended. When they’re facing off against each other, we’re thinking, “this is what it’s come to!” But then, instead, there’s this deus ex ursus.

ADAM That bear was really unconvincing. It looked like the abominable snowman from the Matterhorn ride. But anyway — the dog was also the Heath Ledger character.

BROOM The whole movie was very Brokeback Mountain-y. When he shows up as an adult and they’re whispering because they don’t want to be heard, and he’s asking if they can still be friends. “Those days are over!”

ADAM That too ended, of course, with —

BROOM We haven’t seen it! We don’t know!

ADAM You didn’t? Well then never mind.

BROOM One of them dies, right?

ADAM What do you think?

BROOM One of them dies and the other one mourns.

ADAM No, it actually ends with an epilogue in 1997 and they’re having their commitment ceremony. Anyway, that’s what was interesting about this — it had little echoes of so many different movies. The ending was like — what I’m thinking of is the last scene of Dances With Wolves. The army is hot on their trail and they’re climbing the mountains into the beautiful snowstorm, and Kevin Costner turns around and looks at the sweep of the land: one last look before ascending into the past, you know.

BROOM Climb every mountain. That’s also like The Sound of Music.

ADAM And then all of the bits were totally stock bits.

BROOM The reliance on Warner Brothers routines was, again, sad.

BETH They already established that they’d decided to go that route.

BROOM But this had the first hanging-in-midair-because-you-don’t-realize-you’re-going-to-fall. That was a sad moment. And, as Adam said: “That’s a bird.” Good heckle. When I saw that, my heart sank: it’s come to this. That’s so blatantly another studio’s trademark bit. But when you’re a kid, you don’t take issue with that sort of thing. The world of cartoons has its own principles.

BETH Like the guy’s pants falling down when he shot the rifle.

BROOM To Hootenanny music.

ADAM Which was lifted bar for bar from The Rescuers.

BROOM No. That music was more fun than this. This score was really wretched. It was bad in every direction that it could be bad. Though I didn’t realize it at the very beginning. During the opening credits, when it was sort of misty and you just heard distant forest sounds, it was sort of atmospheric, and I thought, “this could be a little artier than usual!” But then it all went downhill as soon as there was any motion. That over-heavy orchestral approach at the very first notes of music seemed like it might be something ambitious, but it turned out just to be laziness.

BETH The music was full of wrong choices for the material.

BROOM Unconsidered choices.

ADAM Just exclamation points everywhere.

BROOM He just played the action through scenes where we didn’t care about the action, and it felt like he had never met the characters, like he had no idea what the movie was about.

BETH Part of the problem was that there was just so much music. The editors should have just cut it out.

ADAM It was bad and distracting to have all of the Disney voices.

BROOM There was still Pat Buttram in there, but who else?

ADAM Well, Tigger and Piglet.

BROOM Oh, that’s right.

ADAM I liked that the owl was “black woman.” I thought it was going to be the owl from Winnie the Pooh, but it was actually “black woman.” But then she was “black woman” only just barely this side of, like, picketing-the-movie-theater.

BROOM The laziness of that character — who lives on — is inexcusable. What did her Fat Black Mama-ness contribute to anything? The writers didn’t even know what she would say other than “Big Mama’s here…” They envisioned the cliché and they couldn’t manage to write lines for her or give business to her. When she sang a song, it wasn’t a song that “fat black woman” would sing, so it was terrible.

ADAM They needed someone to sing all those torch songs, and they needed to mark it as being set in the South.

BROOM They weren’t torch songs. And then she was strutting around jauntily — she wasn’t even moving like a fat black woman. She was just an owl doing a lot of borrowed business that they didn’t understand.

BETH I like that you wanted her to be more realistic.

BROOM She should have been more characterized. Those black crows in Dumbo might be offensive stereotypes, but at least they’re doing exactly the business that goes along with that stereotype. It gives them character. She didn’t have any character!

ADAM Yes. It was so obviously stock that her sidekick was basically Joe Pesci. It didn’t make any sense.

BROOM You know, that little guy was animated with a little extra punch, which made me think that it was being handled by one of the animators who would go on to be the next generation at Disney. His motions were a little extra snappy, which would later become the norm.

ADAM Everyone say one nice thing about the movie.

BETH Okay: I liked the old lady character, because you don’t usually see old ladies taking care of foxes.

ADAM Though you do see pathetic lonely old people.

BETH But she’s not pathetic. I liked that she had gumption and shot out the radiator of the man’s car, and then made friends with him because she’s a loving person.

BROOM I… during the bear fight scene, didn’t know what was going to happen, and was genuinely watching with sincere interest to see what would happen.

BETH I thought that too. I thought, “I don’t know if they’re going to fall into the waterfall,” and wasn’t really expecting it to happen.

BROOM And isn’t that the experience we would ask of any movie? That we would want to watch it to see what happens in it?

BETH Yes.

BROOM Well, I had that experience during that sequence.

ADAM I enjoyed being able to call what was going to happen, in like eight different scenes. That was comforting. It’s nice to see Vixie make the exact same face that the lady fox makes in Bambi, and do the exact same number on him, right down to his response. It’s not like a Tex Avery “awooogah!” but it’s the Disney version: he looks disheveled and eye-popped.

BROOM When was the first take where someone else reaches out and closes someone’s dropped jaw? We’ve seen it before, right? Actually, you know what? I think I know it from The Little Mermaid, so this might have been the first time. Wait, I have another happy thing to say, sort of: I enjoyed that this movie presented its shoddiness so clearly and so early that we were able to cross the line and just heckle it.

ADAM I think that this really may be the nadir.

BROOM Nope. I don’t think so. I think Oliver and Company may be more painful. But also a more amusing thing to heckle for us because it’s from right in the thick of our benighted childhoods.

[we read the Times review]

BROOM I think Vincent Canby was correct in pretty much writing it off completely.

ADAM I don’t think you could make this movie today, because I think you have to understand the basics of fox-hunting, and I don’t think modern kids would know. You’d have to have a voice-over explaining: “In olden times, hounds hunted foxes…”

BROOM You could show it in a moving title sequence.

BETH You really think that in 1981, kids would know?

ADAM Yeah. I feel like the world has become more urban. Even in the thirty years we’ve been alive, things are different.

BROOM I think you’re describing the thinking that would probably prevail at a movie studio, but would be wrong. Kids could understand it, but yes, this movie wouldn’t get made because nobody would trust that they could.

ADAM They could be made to understand it, but it’s not a piece of furniture in kids’ minds.

BROOM But you understand the premises of any movie because you’re watching the movie. You understand Star Wars without someone having to explain what a lightsaber is or how it works. You see it happen on the screen!

ADAM I guess. I’m just sure it would strike kids as antiquarian and weird.

BROOM It was already supposed to be folksy and old-timey. What state did this take place in?

ADAM Tennessee. I don’t think that Mickey Rooney was a very good choice.

BROOM Totally inappropriate! To play a hot seventeen-year-old?

BETH Yeah, that was weird.

BETH I thought it was great. It was really entertaining.

ADAM Yes, it was very fun. It was totally cheesy and often inadvertently fun, but that doesn’t make it less fun.

BROOM Part of the fun for us is that it embodied all sorts of clichés and tropes and standards that remind us of our childhoods. Not that it was necessarily of high quality. But that’s still fun.

ADAM I think it was overtly of low quality, but still entertaining.

BETH It had a few clever things in it, like the crocodiles playing the organ.

BROOM That was a strong sequence.

ADAM That was eerie.

BROOM I thought that in many places the animation was particularly exuberant compared to what we’ve seen recently.

BETH The expressions on the people — and sometimes the mice — were better than usual.

BROOM The mice seemed a little bland to me, but Madame Medusa and Snoops and the crocodiles were clearly animated with pleasure.

ADAM It seemed like they had accepted the straitened budgets they’re working within, and just decided, “we’re not doing backgrounds.” All the backgrounds were very static, but the things that were animated were lively. The music was the best part for me.

BROOM It was the most period.

ADAM All the pieces were so corn-alicious.

BETH It was like Herb Alpert backing Joni Mitchell.

ADAM I think my single favorite part of the entire movie was the key change in the middle of the rainbow song.

BROOM “Rainy day… [up a half step]… Rainy day!…”

ADAM It reminds me of the way all our choir songs were arranged. We sang “Wind Beneath My Wings” that had a step up like that in the middle, which was my favorite part. I thought it was so dramatic and exciting. “You are the wind beneath my wiiiiiiiii… [up a half step] ….iiiiings!”

BROOM Stirring, yes. The movie announced exactly that aesthetic right at the beginning in the opening credit sequence where they panned over those pastel drawings of the message in the bottle out at sea. What did you say it was like?

ADAM I said it was like the “Golden Girls” credits — though I don’t know if it’s exactly “The Golden Girls” I’m thinking of. But I know that at least one of those 80s shows started with static shots of a family, and panned across them at a dramatic diagonal. Was that “Growing Pains,” or “Family Ties”? [Ed. according to youtube, not really any of these, but we know what you mean] … And then the “zoom in fade to a zoom out”… And what was the instrument that they used in the rainbow song?

BROOM A flugelhorn, I think.

ADAM It sounded like the “Mary Tyler Moore” theme.

BROOM Let’s talk about the plot.

ADAM The first half was just killing time.

BETH That scene in the park really was nothing.

BROOM Yeah, something seemed actually wrong with that scene.

BETH Do you think they originally meant to show the lion?

BROOM What purpose would it have served anyway? As characterization for him as a scaredy-cat? To get them closer somehow? She already has a crush on him from the very beginning for no apparent reason. She didn’t learn anything new about him from that scene.

BETH I thought it was just to have some kind of New York setpiece.

BROOM But so little happened, it really seemed like something must have been pared away. We could have skipped directly over the whole thing to them visiting the orphanage and the movie would be exactly the same.

ADAM Maybe they were padding out the runtime.

BROOM The movie is very short.

ADAM It didn’t really come alive until they got to the bayou. Though the scene at the U.N. is adorable.

BROOM It was cute that at the very very beginning of the script they immediately launch into this really dippy song for two whole verses.

BETH I thought that was cute, but when I was watching it I was thinking, “if I were a kid, this movie would have lost me already.”

BROOM The only stuff I specifically remembered was that there were crocodiles and a girl was held hostage on a riverboat, and then was lowered into a hole in a bucket and there was a skull in the cave.

ADAM I remembered that the diamond was sewn inside the teddy bear; but from my Golden Book, I seem to remember that it was there all along, and only after they escape do they notice and say “what’s this heavy thing in Teddy’s belly?”

BROOM That’s a more effective way to play it.

ADAM There’s a critical scene in Stephen Carter’s novel The Emperor of Ocean Park in which the MacGuffin is hidden inside the teddy bear’s stomach. I wonder if he was motivated by this.

BROOM It’s in so many stories, isn’t it? It’s just standard fare.

BETH It’s in Wait Until Dark.

BROOM It’s in every episode of Duck Tales.

ADAM It’s the same as “if you don’t find it in your own backyard, you never really lost it to begin with.”

BROOM I don’t know about that.

ADAM It’s the same idea. The greatest mystery is hidden in the most domestic of objects.

BROOM Well, I feel like there is a whole subset of children’s literature — at least of our era — where a kid is being used by adults to find some treasure that only a kid can find. Either because only kids can fit there or because only kids will go unsuspected, or just because only kids are curious and unpredictable enough to find things that nobody else can find. Like in Over Sea, Under Stone, it’s the kids who find the long-lost treasure map in the house, because that’s how kids are. And in fact they end up going down in a hole in a cliff by the ocean, just like in this movie. Did that sort of thing start in this era, or did that exist prior to this?

BETH No Deposit, No Return is like that too. The kids get kidnapped by bad guys who try to use them to steal for them because they’re small and can fit in little places.

BROOM Isn’t Candleshoe sort of about how Jodie Foster needs to find the hidden thing in the house because she, as the little girl, is the most likely to find it?

BETH Yeah. It was popular. [ed. Also released in 1977.]

BROOM And it’s always in these decrepit environs.

ADAM The plot made no sense. No element of the plot made sense at all. From the beginning, when they adopted a little girl from a New York orphanage to put her inside a cave in a bayou…

BROOM They didn’t adopt her; they kidnapped her.

BETH She apparently got in a car with them. That’s what the cat said.

ADAM Oh. Well, that still doesn’t make any sense. And the fact that they know the treasure is in this cave, even though they have no other way to get in there…

BROOM Wait a minute. It makes perfect sense! They know that the treasure is down the hole…

BETH How do they know that?

BROOM She had a treasure map with an X on it! Didn’t you see?

BETH Oh. But… why doesn’t anyone else know about it? How did she get that map?

BROOM She owns a pawn shop! Think about it! Somehow this treasure map ends up in her store. She goes down to check it out and realizes that only a very tiny person can fit down the hole. She lives down the street from an orphanage and since nobody cares about orphans, she decides she’ll just steal one and have it retrieve the treasure for her. It makes perfect sense!

ADAM All right. That wasn’t really spelled out.

BROOM All the pieces were there. How did she come to live on an abandoned riverboat? She probably just found it there. The crocodiles? She didn’t just find them, they were clearly her longtime pets.

BETH But who was Snoops?

ADAM Her accountant.

BETH Oh!

ADAM I’m just making that up.

BETH No, I like that.

BROOM He’s just some guy who works for her at the shop.

ADAM He’s Mr. DeVil.

BROOM You know how Lex Luthor has Ned Beatty working for him in the movies? This is the same guy. Bad guys with totally ineffectual henchman are standard operating procedure. Have we seen it already in these movies?

ADAM Yeah. He was very jovially drawn. I enjoyed that.

BROOM They both had a 70s sort of sleaze to them.

BETH Their bodies felt more real than the other bodies.

BROOM They were exaggerated, but it was an exaggerated dumpiness.

BETH That’s what I mean.

BROOM She felt like a Jules Feiffer character. I remembered the image of her pulling off her false eyelashes. You got the clear sense that she was a labor of love for some animator.

ADAM Would we want our children to learn the lessons implicit in this movie? Come to think of it, we were the children being taught these lessons. What did this tell us?

BROOM I don’t really know. The stuff about faith — “faith is a bluebird” — seemed pretty tacked-on, and I wasn’t sure what it was meant to teach us anyway. Religion was more present in this than I expected.

ADAM Isn’t that just “the sun will come out tomorrow”?

BROOM Well, yes. Essentially, this was Annie.

BETH That’s true about religion. She prayed.

BROOM And there was that star representing her faith.

BETH And also the fact that she wasn’t cute, and had a poor self-image…

ADAM Like Jesus!

BETH … but got adopted anyway… I guess that was what she had faith in.

ADAM Despite the fact that she was so ugly, she got to have her own diamond…

BROOM Were we actually supposed to think she was ugly? I thought that was just what cruel people would say to her.

BETH Well, she had a gap in her teeth.

ADAM This was perfectly fine, but it will be outclassed thoroughly in about a decade.

BETH It wasn’t “classy” in any way.

BROOM Wait a minute. I don’t think we should say this was perfectly fine.

BETH I loved it; I thought it was so much fun; BUT…

ADAM It was blatantly inferior to the product of the 30s, 40s and 50s. But it was fine.

BROOM Would you say that it was inferior to Robin Hood or The Jungle Book? On par? Superior?

ADAM It was more slapdash.

BETH In what sense? I thought the story was actually better than those. I, as a grown-up, was pretty involved in this stupid plot. I didn’t get bored — except at the beginning — but after they got out of New York, I wasn’t bored, and usually with these movies I am.

ADAM I feel like we’re erecting castles on a continuously sinking platform.

BROOM I know! I just want to make sure we keep talking about that. While we were watching, we would laugh whenever they’d bring in a song, or when the tone would change abruptly…

ADAM We didn’t mention the “rescue” music that played when Evinrude was pushing the leaf.

BROOM The Hawaii Five-O sort of thing. Yeah. There were so many choices that were — not exactly “jarring”… but tasteless. I guess there were hints of that in Robin Hood too, where there was zany guitar chase music — and then this had that hillbilly hootenanny chase music at the end.

ADAM This was deeply offensive. But wasn’t that also in Robin Hood?

BROOM More or less. This group of “southerners” was nearly equivalent to the villagers in Robin Hood.

ADAM I remember back in the 30s and 40s, we were talking about the stock Irishmen. But not anymore; poor whites are the readily mockable group now.

BETH They even used the word “trashy.”

BROOM Referring to Medusa.

ADAM She’s not a southerner.

BROOM What I was going to say: I felt like I was seeing the rudiments of the post-Little Mermaid style, the slick 90s product. But they hadn’t been fit together yet. The idea of integrating many different varieties of crowd-pleasing stuff in a contemporary, fast-paced way — that’s what the Disney product would become in the Beauty and the Beast era. Maybe this was the 1977 equivalent of that, but it felt to me a little like they hadn’t worked it out.

BETH It wasn’t slick.

ADAM It’s also not conceptually there, though. Even if this had had a budget like they had in the 90s, it still wasn’t well thought out. Maybe we’ll get to The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast and find that they’re just as dated, which would be disappointing, but I feel like those plots are more memorable. Though I guess the plot here was just “rescue the lost girl.”

BROOM How many rescue plots have we seen? I think 101 Dalmatians was the first one.

ADAM Sleeping Beauty is sort of a rescue plot.

BROOM No, I mean, like, quest-cue plots. This and 101 Dalmatians are both about people who have been stolen away and need to be rescued. It’s a very convenient format for these movies because the journey creates an episodic scheme. First we meet the inhabitants of one location, then the next, then the next… We didn’t meet Evinrude the mosquito until they got to the bayou.

ADAM It’s a picaresque in some sense.

BROOM Finding Nemo irritated me for depending so blatantly on this formula. 101 Dalmatians was mostly the same formula, and Aristocats was the same formula but badly executed.

BETH This was better than Aristocats.

BROOM Oh, definitely. Better use of Eva Gabor, too. I thought her character had a charm here that was lacking in the identical character in Aristocats.

ADAM She was kind of pretty.

BROOM So: Madame Medusa. How do we see her as fitting into the pantheon of maniacal, desperate females?

ADAM Perfectly! She continues the trend of monstrous female vanity into a new era. She had sort of a flapper vanity.

BROOM That’s right. We were confused about the setting of the movie, in fact, because she had intentionally surrounded herself with all this 20s and 30s stuff.

ADAM But she’s motivated by the same impulse as the Snow White queen, in some sense: “who’s the fairest of them all?” Whenever we saw her she was either getting dressed, or putting on makeup, or taking off makeup.

BETH But she didn’t actually care about her attractiveness. I mean, she did, but it was for no one other than herself.

ADAM Well, when she answered the phone she tried make her voice sound appealing: “Madame Medusa’s Pawn Shop Bou-tique!” You can sort of imagine her leading a vixen-ish life in the city.

BROOM She imagines that, but she clearly doesn’t lead that life.

ADAM Well, who is Ursula from The Little Mermaid all vamped up for? It’s just femininity curdled upon itself.

BROOM Exactly. So why is that in Disney movies? Why do we keep seeing this woman who has gone to seed?

BETH Because it’s the opposite of a princess. The princess is beautiful inside and out…

BROOM This is like a desperate clutching at beauty.

BETH Yes, because they don’t understand that it actually springs from the inside.

ADAM This figure is frequently opposed by a bibbidi-bobbidi sort of motherly crone, who is not beautiful but is good. The Sleeping Beauty fairies, Cinderella’s fairy godmother.

BROOM And how does Eva Gabor fit into this?

ADAM Well, she’s sort of a new type. You don’t ever really see leggy dames in these movies.

BROOM There was Lady, but she was sort of a different type because she was infantilized at the same time.

ADAM Lady and the Tramp wasn’t really a fairy-tale plot, the way this was. Although even there, you had… what’s her name?

BROOM Goldie Hawn.

ADAM Basically, there are a lot of weird images of women, which Disney is going to try desperately to atone for in the 90s.

BROOM Do you think they were really trying to atone? Or were they just trying to codify it and turn it into something with thought behind it, rather than just letting it happen?

ADAM I think Disney feels special pressure to be feminist now because of their miserable heritage.

BROOM You think of this as a miserable heritage? I assume they ended up with this stuff in their movies because they were thinking in terms of making “memorable characters,” and this is all just what would occur to them.

ADAM That’s right; it just occurs to them from deep in the recesses of some cultural standards.

BROOM Yes, I know, they’re a reflection of real prejudices. But I don’t know what this particular set of stuff says about their society. I can’t even think of a phony thesis about what it means about the culture that guys trying to make movies would keep thinking that maybe the villain should be a crazed woman with a lot of makeup on.

ADAM Or that there should be this duality between evil artifice-using women, and pretty unlined princesses. And also wise crones. It’s weird.

BETH It’s partly to communicate instantly to kids who to root for and who to root against.

ADAM But the males are all so bland by comparison. No male ever has to stand for any particular type of maleness.

BROOM What about the Tramp?

ADAM Fine; but again, Lady and the Tramp works differently. Think about all the heroes in these movies. They all blend together, because all they stand for is: “boy.” Prince Charming, and Cinderella’s prince…

BROOM Well, the princes, sure, and I guess Robin Hood is just “a Robin Hood” — but Baloo has a particular slacker attitude that he represents.

ADAM Yeah, but he doesn’t represent maleness exactly. He represents a character trait. Whereas it’s femininity itself that’s stands out as the “not X” state. It’s like when I staged weddings between my stuffed animals, I would make dresses for the brides with Kleenex, but I never thought to make an outfit for the male animals, because that was the normal state. They needed some kind of identifying characteristic to make them female.

BROOM I hear that. I hear what you’re saying, so this is kind of a devil’s advocate point, but: I don’t think that anyone who worked on this movie or on the character of Madame Medusa would say that they were trying to project the concept of “female-ness.” Or would agree with your assessment that that’s what they had done. The way I would phrase this point is that men in these movies never have psychologies, they just have characteristics. Whereas Madame Medusa has a psychology. She’s insane. I can’t think of any men who “have issues.” Bernard the mouse here is “afraid” or “superstitious” or whatever, but it’s a characteristic dropped on him; you don’t need that knowledge to explain anything else.

ADAM The “thirteen” phobia stuff was stupid, especially since nothing ever happened because of it.

BROOM That’s exactly what I hated about Finding Nemo, The dad was “afraid.” That movie was actually exactly like this one. Also, those two crocodiles are going to reappear as the two eels in The Little Mermaid. But back to the point: have there been any men who had personalities?

ADAM As opposed to traits?

BROOM Yes.

BETH Merlin in The Sword in the Stone.

ADAM Sort of. Let’s look through the canon.

[We do.]

BROOM Ichabod Crane was one, and he felt very pointedly like a bizarre exception. He was a characterized weirdo, and that’s not something that they do very much. … Oh, well, Captain Hook. I guess he was basically the male equivalent of this.

ADAM And he’s very prissy. We’ll see it again with Jafar, and again with Scar. These vamping, effeminate males.

BROOM I think a redeeming way of looking at this is that the essentially villainous trait is not femininity, it’s vanity.

ADAM But rendered in a highly effeminate way. Gaston in Beauty and the Beast is a laudable attempt to show vanity in a non-effeminate way. I think of that as characteristic of the “striving” phase of Disney.

BROOM But Gaston was essentially already in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as Brom Bones. Again, that one was sort of an exception in terms of characterization.

ADAM I don’t want to overdraw the thesis here. But I think it’s fair to say that there’s something odd afoot.

BETH Most of the animators are male, of course.

ADAM What sort of dude was an animator in the 50s?

BROOM Art school guys. Draftsmen. You can see these guys on interviews on all these DVDs. They all seem like Snoopses. That character type, who’s not quite a milquetoast, he’s sort of just a nerd, or a loser… I don’t know exactly what that is either. But he was fun to watch.

ADAM Yeah, they’re all sort of like R. Crumb gazing at the big super-breasted woman.

BROOM And Bob Newhart was basically nothing.

ADAM Bob Newhart was in this?

BROOM Yeah, as the main mouse.

ADAM Really? Oh. He sucked.

BROOM I thought it was funny that they tried to character-ize a mosquito. You can’t even draw a face on a mosquito.

ADAM They just drew eyebrows.

BROOM And they gave him a scarf.

BETH There were lots of underwear shots, oddly.

ADAM There was an uncomfortable Coppertone ad quality when Penny shows the holes in her underwear.

BETH And when the crocodile is carrying her by the underpants.

BROOM And Madame Medusa’s underwear shows gratuitously. I got the impression that whoever was drawing Madame Medusa might have been a little attracted to her despite her ugliness.

BETH Really? I don’t want to think about that.

ADAM Well, she was a force.

[We proceed to look at pictures of the infamous obscene image that wasn’t found and removed until 1999, and then read the New York Times review.]

ADAM This period of the late 70s feels like the conceited nadir of children’s entertainment. It feels like a bleak time for children’s culture in America. And we were in it!

BROOM Say more. What do you mean?

ADAM I don’t know, I feel like I’ve encountered this idea elsewhere, that the late 70s and early 80s stand in marked contrast to the 50s, and later the 90s, which were relatively friendly times for children in popular culture.

BETH Yeah, there was a sense that parents didn’t really care what children were seeing or doing.

ADAM This is like the world of The Ice Storm. Not to be overdramatic.

BROOM I mean, yes, this was a movie about a girl who was abandoned, but I felt like the movie itself was attentive to childhood considerations. It was basically inoffensive, right?

BETH Yes.

[Adam asks us to look up box office numbers for various Disney movies but this proves frustrating and things devolve.]