ADAM Well. That might be the worst one.

BETH It’s hard. I still think Fox and the Hound was worse.

BROOM This at least had production values in its favor. Fox and the Hound seemed shoddy even on that level. Not to say that this didn’t also have dubious choices in the visual department. But it looked like something. Fox and the Hound looked chintzy most of the time.

ADAM Four movies ago we were so excited that this breath of fresh Broadway air was being blown into the Disney musical, and now they’ve already exhausted that possibility, such that we are going to have to shift into ‘tude and snark as the next mode.

BROOM They had already started shifting within this movie. The totally gratuitous forest animal characters were not actually characterized this time around. They were just ‘tude.

ADAM But that’s in all of them, that’s not snark.

BROOM Can you say any word to characterize Flit the hummingbird? What would you say is Flit’s salient personality trait?

ADAM Didn’t the little mermaid have a fish friend, who did nothing but get into trouble with the shark?

BROOM Yeah, Flounder. He was an enthusiastic buddy character who was a little childlike, looked up to her. She had charisma that was cool to him.

ADAM I don’t think that these characters were that different. The raccoon would not have ever said “Cowabunga.”

BROOM That’s only one variety of ‘tude.

ADAM This was just so formulaic. It was kind of awesome at points, actually, just how super-Broadway it was.

BETH The tree-chopping number, what was that called?

BROOM “Mine Mine Mine.”

BETH That was so over the top Broadway, it was so choreographed and…

BROOM Gay.

BETH Yes, but not even that. Just the lavishness of that crazy number.

ADAM Whenever you have a song cross-cutting between two different characters expressing two different things…

BROOM The supposed parallel between the two halves made absolutely no sense in that song. They just decided it was going to be “one of those.”

ADAM I think that when they did “Savages” and “Colors of the Wind,” they were high on their visual daring. I think they thought they were Mary Blair, totally paving new ground. I think they were like, “this is some sophisticated shit that we’re doing here!”

BROOM I think they thought they were unearthing the beautiful paving of old ground. I thought they thought “we are doing Sleeping Beauty for the first time in two generations. No-one has really done this in years.” And you know, it’s true! It’s too bad this movie sucked ass, because that is a thing worth digging back out. But it never felt sensible.

ADAM Everyone say what you thought was the thing that made it terrible, beyond merely just dull.

BROOM For me what made it was terrible was the intensity of a complaint that I’ve made about previous movies, about The Lion King: that they were doing it all just because they knew that these were things you’re supposed to do, but that they did not understand the reasoning behind any of it.

ADAM The complete insincerity.

BROOM It’s based on a fervent superficial understanding of prior Disney movies, which makes it feel… gay, for want of a better word. It’s fetishistic. Whatever it means to them doesn’t directly have to do with what it’s actually supposed to “mean.”

BETH Mine is sort of related to that: they didn’t seem to think about who would be watching this. Does this appeal to kids at all? It’s a love story! As a kid, I never cared about the love story part of stories, and it was all a love story. And then it was war-ish. I just don’t feel like they were thinking about how it was playing to the intended audience.

ADAM I find this exceptionally offensive because it’s about a really lurid and tragic period in American history. It’s like if you did a Romeo and Juliet with, like, a slave daughter and a plantation owner’s son.

BROOM Or a Jew and a Nazi.

ADAM Yeah, kind of! I mean, it’s wonderful that she makes this peace between them, but of course they’re all going to die in three years from smallpox. To take a nominally historical subject and make it into just cannon-fodder for your schmaltzy story… was terrible.

BROOM But, to go back to what I said about Lion King, what’s offensive is that they on some level agree that it would be irresponsible to just do that, so they start making a show of caring about “showing proper respect.”

ADAM Well, the PC-ness of it was also bad.

BETH That was just the 90s, though.

BROOM But you can get away with this tasteless, tasteless thing if the reasoning is just, “this is going to be a good story; I know we can sell this, guys.” What’s offensive here is that the message of the movie is to paint with all the colors of the wind, like the Native Americans did, and talk to the trees, like the Native Americans did.

ADAM Do you remember the ill-fated sitcom… I think it was “All-American Girl” with Margaret Cho, in the late 90s? And the producers were super-excited that it was the first sitcom about an Asian-American family, but then it fell apart in part because Asian-American groups denounced it, because one of the actors was Japanese, and one was Korean, and they spoke in like a mish-mash language. It was all just “Asian.” Here it was just a total pastiche of every cliche image of Native Americans that anyone could think of. Combined with a reverent sort of “…guys, the environment!…”

BROOM Let’s talk about why Avatar was better than this.

ADAM Because it wasn’t set in colonial Virginia; it was set in fantasy space. And it was even more luridly colorful.

BROOM I daresay that the main reason Avatar was better was because it was actually selling this totally hackneyed cheeseball formula story. And this never sold it. It never believed in any of the elements that needed to make it work. We didn’t believe that the characters loved each other; we didn’t believe that they were characters.

ADAM They had no personalities.

BROOM Especially him. She at least sang a song about the riverbend, which is weak but it’s something. He had nothing. He had nothing going for him. He didn’t look good, either.

BETH I beg to disagree. No, I don’t.

ADAM Even I don’t think he was hot.

BETH No, he was not hot. But she was so hot that it was like they didn’t know how to handle all the angles of her face. Sometimes she looked like a block.

BROOM Once again, the disproportionate expertise at drawing her ass and her breasts was inappropriate. They should hire people who have not practiced that as much. She was the best-drawn animation in the movie.

BETH Physically. Body-wise. But her face I had problems with.

BROOM Well, even her face was the best in the movie, because the rest of the faces… The animation was at once slick and polished, and also wrong. I felt like it was the CalArts class of 1992, and they’ve all been taught this and read books about “how to animate in the Disney style,” and it looks like phony crap.

ADAM And the villain, Captain Ratcliffe, was like weak tea. He was no Ursula, or Jafar, or Scar.

BETH He wasn’t even really a villain.

ADAM Yeah, he was just nothin’. And his just desserts are, like, a dry scone.

BROOM Because what are the desserts? Like you were saying, the whole story is distasteful: Are the white invaders demons who must be killed or else the natives are going to lose everything that they care about? Yes. This is true. Are they all likely to shoot the savages rather than talk to them? Yes. So it’s not just this one guy who’s the villain. He represents the beliefs of his entire culture; this is what he was sent to do. The amount of trickery that he actually resorts to is minimal, if any. As he says at the end, “I couldn’t have planned it better!” Because of course, he didn’t plan it. He doesn’t do anything devious. It makes no sense at all for there to be this preening “bad guy” character.

ADAM And it would have been better if they’d killed them. If the Native Americans had had a policy of no surrender, fighting every white person, they might have had a fighting chance of not all getting exterminated.

BETH A very irresponsible movie.

BROOM The songs are very bad. The lyrics are very bad.

BETH Yes, and thought they were clever, which made it worse.

BROOM Yes, that’s Stephen Schwartz trying to show that he’s a pro. Alan Menken dug Disney out of the hole of the 80s with Little Mermaid, so they obviously feel very indebted to him, and they’re going to keep hiring him, but I think here we see that he has his limitations. He couldn’t figure out what to do. “Okay, the Englishmen are going to sing an Englishmen’s sailing song at the beginning… go.” And look what he came up with.

ADAM Which was the same as the Dane’s sailing song at the beginning of The Little Mermaid.

BROOM But that song was actually charming on some level. This was like the squarest…

BETH I felt like they knew it, because they were muffling it. You couldn’t actually hear the words except for “Virginia” at the end.

BROOM I think it was badly music-directed. A lot of the recordings were not well done; a lot of the singing was not good.

BETH Did Mel Gibson do his own singing? It sounded like it. [ed.: It seems he did.]

BROOM You said the orchestration of “Colors of the Wind,” which was supposed to be so spectacular, was disappointing to you.

BETH It was jumbly. I thought it was being ostentatious and getting in the way of the song communicating. It just sounded weird to me; I kept noticing it.

BROOM In all the arrangements, you felt the strain of them trying to express some kind of sweep, and they couldn’t get there.

ADAM WhoooSH! I can’t make the sound of an orchestra, but, like, that harp sound.

BROOM When I think from an editorial point of view, I think that wanting to get sweep across in a love story — all the effects they wanted to achieve — they’re not impossible things, and when they work, they’re worth doing. It’s just an issue of craft. Resorting to the damn swirling leaves on the wind every time you want to show that something is magical and stirring is weak. It shows that you don’t know what you’re doing.

ADAM You should see The New World, the Terence Malick movie, because it’s about the same subject, the grandeur and mystery of two cultures meeting, but it’s a good movie, in part because it’s really spare. Whereas here to convey this grandeur they had to make more waterfalls… you know, more cowbell. I had that in the back of my mind as I was watching this, and the tastelessness of this was exacerbated by that contrast.

BETH I think the only actual character in this movie was the tree. The only fully-realized thing.

BROOM Full realized as a fairy godmother; she wasn’t anything more than that.

ADAM But at least she was something.

BETH I was just thinking, if I were a kid, what part would be my favorite part? What part would I look forward to if someone put this on in school, or something? It would be the tree part. And that would be it. Or the colors at the end, because it was kind of visually interesting.

BROOM My favorite would be the parts that had visual flair. “Colors of the Wind,” which was supposed to be like an animation spectacular… you know, sure, it was.

ADAM I liked the friend.

BROOM Oh yeah, she’s a real character.

BETH That’s true, she was real.

ADAM The real Pocahontas, incidentally, did go to London. And they sort of paraded her around court, and then she died there a couple years later.

BROOM She probably wasn’t as beautiful.

ADAM No, I don’t think she was. Probably because she was a fourteen-year-old girl. And John Smith was in his forties.

BROOM So with that in mind, how could this movie possibly have happened, really? They were like, “what should we make a movie about?” and they have a bunch of things on the wall. You know, “Treasure Island… Robinson Crusoe…”

BETH Don’t you think it was that they could make a really hot character? “I really wanna draw this woman.” I think that has something to do with it.

ADAM I think they just wanted to have some sort of non-white heroine. Mulan‘s coming up.

BROOM Powerful. Female. Minority.

ADAM “Betsy Ross! Oh, no, wait.”

BROOM And because this movie so deeply doesn’t work, because this story doesn’t actually lend itself, it’s so transparent that that’s the only reason this movie exists. And that’s embarrassing!

ADAM I really think Sacagawea would be a cool story. At least that at least has a sort of adventure plot.

BROOM She actually has to be good at something.

ADAM Sacagawea was my favorite of the Value Tales. She was like the “Value of Adventure” or something. It’s not as much just a nubile Indian princess who locks eyes with the white man. She has to win Lewis and Clark’s respect through her canny tracking.

BETH This was just so dull! Even in the beginning, when the ship was going through the storm, I found my mind wandering.

ADAM I know! My mind just went blank!

BETH I found myself thinking about something else, and I was like, “wait a second! wait a second!”

ADAM I had the same experience! Because they were just doing a storm, and I was like, “oh, storm storm storm storm storm.”

BROOM Before the title, we’re subjected to a guy falling overboard and then John Smith saves him, which was supposed to be the characterization scene for John Smith, which is such a mistake. And those of you reading at home should know that at that point, Adam, or Beth, I can’t remember which one of you said it, asked “can we start talking over this movie?” It was already obviously bad, thirty seconds in. I mean, it was bad one second in, because they were singing what may have been the worst song in the movie. And that’s sayin’ something.

ADAM And Thomas, who I think was supposed to be poignant, because he’s trying to be loyal to John Smith but then he kills the guy, which could be interesting, but he’s just nothin’. He even looks like a nothin’.

BROOM He looked worse than Johnny Appleseed. Okay, here’s what we haven’t directly talked about: the art direction, which seemed to be the one thing in this movie that seemed to have some passion behind it…

BETH Yes, there was passion behind it.

BROOM So what did we think of it, though?

ADAM Garish and unpleasant to look at.

BROOM I thought the Mary Blair-isms, at least in this desert, were pleasant.

BETH Yes, occasionally there would just be a nice picture on the screen. At the end when they were about to kill them, it wasn’t necessarily well done but it was still interesting.

ADAM But why did everything have to be, like, pink and orange and electric blue, through the whole movie?

BROOM I think they were watching Fantasia and were like, “we work at Disney! We’re the ones to do this, now!”

BETH And I guess they thought it would work with the story because they’re in this new world.

ADAM Because of the colors of the wind.

BETH Exactly.

BROOM The songs in this were exactly self-parody.

[we then watch the Just Around the Riverbend sing-along feature and mock the song. Then we move on to the Colors of the Wind sing-along…]

ADAM Why do Broadway songs always sound like they have too many notes in them? They go up and down too much.

BROOM Because they think about story, and then they think about lyrics, and then they think about setting them, and that’s the wrong order for making a song catchy.

[Pocahontas sings “How can there be so much that you don’t know?”]

ADAM See, like why is this going up and down??

BROOM Because there’s too many words! If you just starting making up a melody, it would probably only have room for a couple of syllables in it. When you decide that you’re going to set “My name is Pocahontas and I’m an Indian princess,” then you have to go, yeah, up and down, all over the place, to fill out the time.

[We continue to heckle Colors of the Wind]

BROOM All the times in this movie where someone goes “whoa!” because magic is whirling around them, like when Cinderella gets her dress — which is the original of that image — that’s some seriously wussy fantasy, right?

BETH Whose fantasy is that, really?

BROOM It’s people who listen to music from Japanese role-playing games in orchestral arrangements. That’s a type of person. Hair blowing in the wind is really meaningful to them, somehow. And this movie felt like it had been made by them. And those are people who don’t understand people.

(we read the New York Times review)

BETH She started out saying that it was great and then backpedaled.

BROOM I think she wanted to say that it was great for some reason, possibly political, and then had to admit that many aspects of it were not. But she was overall more willing to go with this movie than we were. And I remember thinking it was terrible when I saw it originally.

ADAM This is not even the best movie about Native Americans made in the early 1990s. I mean, Dances With Wolves made me cry as a kid, over and over.

BROOM Kevin Costner would have been a better John Smith.

ADAM Between Dances With Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, I had such a crush on Kevin Costner.

(then we watch the Siskel and Ebert review)

BETH Blah blah blah, 90s.

BROOM Is Gene Siskel’s serious reaction there telling us that we need to remember that even though to our eyes now, this might seem like an infantile form of liberal guilt, we all were that infantile a mere fifteen years ago?

BETH Yes. I think so. I don’t know why everyone started being more aware of this in the 90s, but it was trendy.

ADAM Bill Clinton.

BETH And honestly, I think, “The Real World.” The show. I’m serious.

BROOM Explain.

BETH It was bringing diversity to young people. It was exposing the prejudices of the people in the house and making young viewers think about them. It had, like, a black woman who was a rapper from a poor neighborhood, and then in season two or three there was a guy with AIDs. It was consciously trying to be “diverse”…

BROOM Maybe this was your route to being made aware of this sort of thing.

BETH Yeah, it was, but I watched TV all the time.

BROOM And that was the first time that hit you.

BETH Yes.

BROOM This is a reminder to myself to look up whether “This is what you get when races are diverse” really was a lyric in this movie.

[ed. Yes. But on the soundtrack album the lyric is, reportedly, “Their whole disgusting race is like a curse,” which makes more sense. This was one of a couple of lyrics rewritten shortly before the movie was released, apparently because they had “tested” as too offensive.]

ADAM I feel like the 90s is when diversity became, like, “official.” Obviously there was consciousness of race and diversity in the 70s and 80s, but it was kind of a liberal thing, whereas I feel like in the 90s everyone capitulated and it became sort of state religion.

BROOM When did the phrase “political correctness” come into being?

ADAM 1991, I want to say. [ed.: more complicated than that] That was the time of the speech codes, and, like… Leonard Jeffries, this professor at CUNY who taught that white people are evil… I don’t know where the actual term “political correctness” stems from, but it was fresh enough in 1993 that Bill Maher thought it would be a funny title for his show.

BROOM Yes, exactly, it was still recent and live at the time of this movie.

ADAM I had this book called “The Politically Correct Handbook” that came out in 1993 that was just absurd politically correct terminology for various things, but it felt funny in 1993.

BROOM I remember “Politically Correct Fairy Tales” around the same time.

ADAM Right. I don’t know why that stuff seemed so funny then.

BROOM But having your eyes opened to the fact that “the story you were told in school was one-sided, man!” — that goes back much further. That was happening in the 60s… it was happening on an intellectual level for decades before that.

ADAM Yes, this is a fifty-year trend here, but it does feel — maybe it’s just because of when I was growing up — this feels like an inflection from the early 90s, but maybe that’s because that was also when I first became politically aware.

BROOM It definitely hit the mass culture in a big way at that point. Was it that it was seen as marketable, or did it just make people feel good about themselves to be peddling it? Did Disney do this because it made them feel good about themselves, or was there some kind of calculation behind it, like, “this is what sells now.”

ADAM Probably both.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM It’s strange stuff. And look at the reactionary price we’re paying for it now.

ADAM Yeah, although everyone understands that the Tea Party people, and the “birthers,” are all crazy wackos.

BETH Well, obviously not everyone understands! How did they all get elected, then?

BROOM No-one understands! The point is, they are the extremists, but a big chunk of the population considers them “not that crazy.” And the reason they feel that sympathy is because of terrible movies like this. This is the reason that Sarah Palin is a figure in our cultural life.

BETH Oh, I bet she likes this movie. It’s about a strong woman in the wilderness.

BROOM No! You know what people would say when they saw this: “Oh, of course, the white people are bad.”

ADAM I was going to make a joke and say that this movie is what turned [mutual friend] into a conservative, but that’s not such a joke. He started out as sort of a modern Democrat, but he loved to harp on this movie. It is true that [mutual friends’] umbrage at Liberal-dom is this feeling that the thumb of oppressive mediocrity is pressing down on us. This idea that “the grown-ups are telling you what to think.”

BROOM Oh, but they love grown-ups. They love really grown up grown-ups. Their horror is that actually grown-upness has been replaced with some kind of inane tea-sipping guilt-trip.

ADAM Pablum. Yeah.

BROOM This is like the ladies’ book club of self-flagellation, and that’s what they hate. That all of the real men who really know what’s going on are being told that they don’t feel bad enough about slavery. And that’s a totally sympathetic perspective, if it were actually how things work, but I think it’s mostly a straw man, one that persists because of movies like this, because of what went on in the mass culture. It’s in the popular imagination, and yes, that does affect elections, but it shouldn’t. But it does. Did people vote for Obama because he was black and it made them feel good about themselves to vote for a black guy?

ADAM I sure did!

BROOM Probably, yes. But they also did it because all those people for whom that is true and could totally be held against them also sympathized with his policies. This idea that things happen solely because of bullshit is only true in the forum of Disney movies. I believe. Well, maybe not only.

ADAM Well, after you turn off the recording I will talk more about why I voted for Obama, but I don’t want that to be on the internet.

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.