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.]

BROOM This was three different short features that had been packed into one movie, and I think the quality of those three shorts varied. They weren’t all at the same level, and I think the idea of packing them together was detrimental to all of them.

BETH Which was the worst one?

BROOM The middle one.

ADAM All of them. I thought that was almost unwatchable. I was so upset.

BETH I didn’t think it was unwatchable. I thought it was dull, but it was interesting to me that both Pooh and Tigger seemed like very self-involved characters. That felt new. It seemed new to be so self-referential in general.

BROOM How do you mean?

BETH Like, “I’m rumbly in my tumbly…” Basically they were saying “I’m so cute, aren’t I?”

ADAM They were assholes.

BETH And Tigger and his song about how he’s the only one. “The best thing about me is that I’m the only one!”

ADAM It’s true. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that does feel very, like, Tiny Toons…

BETH The seventies were the “me” decade.

BROOM But both of those things come from the book, which is from 1925 or something.

BETH Really?

BROOM Have you never read the book?

BETH I haven’t.

ADAM Have you ever read the book?

BROOM Yes I have.

ADAM I adore the books and that’s part of why I’m so angry about this.

BROOM Really? Because at the end, when Christopher Robin was going away to school, you said “this doesn’t happen in the book,” and when he was saying sentimental stuff like “will you always remember me,” you said, “oh, man…” But it does happen in the book. I remember the end of the book making me tear up because it was so manipulatively poignant, exactly like that.

ADAM Which book? “Now We Are Six”?

BROOM Whichever one is the last one. Whichever is the one where Christopher Robin has a little talk with Pooh about where he’s going, and Pooh doesn’t understand, and Christopher Robin is sad that he can’t really explain to him why he has to leave the Hundred Acre Wood.

ADAM I don’t remember that scene.

BROOM Well, it was just painful. I don’t think I’d ever seen this feature-length version with that ending. The first short I had seen many times; we must have had that in some accessible place on tape. To me, the only truy awful thing in here was the redo of “Pink Elephants.” What did they think they were getting away with? “Shameless” doesn’t begin to cover it.

ADAM I’m sure that they convinced themselves that it was homage.

BETH They just ripped it off.

BROOM Or did they think that kids wouldn’t have seen Dumbo? Was there a point at which the Disney properties were not a constant in the public consciousness?

BETH Prior to home video, were Disney movies really always available?

BROOM Not always available, but they were released cyclically.

ADAM Recall when we were children that they came out every seven years in theaters.

BETH So if you were five, you might have missed Dumbo. And the sequence worked in the context of the era.

ADAM It’s interesting that this tried so slavishly to make the point that it was following the books, because it failed so utterly to capture their spirit.

BROOM That’s the issue I was focused on, when we started watching, and I thought that at least in the first segment, they had in some ways gotten the spirit of it across. The conceit that they’re stuffed animals and these stories are sort of Christopher Robin’s playing with them, but they’re also sort of their own beings in their own world… I thought that was handled carefully. I liked that he would drag Winnie-the-Pooh along like a kid dragging a stuffed animal, but at the same time Winnie-the-Pooh would sort of be alive. I thought they had struck a nice balance. And then in the latter segments it drifted and started to feel more like an episode of “Gummi Bears” by the end.

ADAM But what saves Pooh from being an asshole in the books, from being this self-absorbed sort of Hunny Monster, is that he’s so dumb. The real Pooh has an intense seriousness about everything he says, which makes it all humorous.

BROOM When he invents a little hum, he’s very truly proud.

ADAM He’s very serious all the time. When he says, “I think the bees are getting suspicious,” that’s funny because he’s dead serious.

BROOM Because he’s announcing his new thought.

BETH It’s not ironic at all.

BROOM There’s no sense of winking.

ADAM And he’s not cute!

BROOM But the author is constantly winking at the reader.

ADAM Right, but Pooh is not.

BETH He’s not aware of how cute he is.

ADAM Which is how little kids are cute, too, because they’re very serious. Picture a little kid with a furrowed brow and a pouting face, which is adorable. This was just treacly.

BROOM He wasn’t really winking here, either. But he did remind me of Homer Simpson in the scene where he was falling asleep and talking about how he couldn’t hear because there was fluff in his ear.

BETH Yeah. Stuff like “go back to the part when the fluff got in my ear” made me not like him. Because he has no awareness of how others might be experiencing the world.

ADAM And I used to think that Sterling Holloway was a great choice for the voice…

BETH I never liked it!

ADAM … but it’s just so treacly and bumptious! I said “treacly” twice, but I mean it.

BROOM You’ll get them both. Who should the voice have been? Should they have done it like the Peanuts cartoons with an actual six-year-old reading the lines as best he could?

BETH I think that might have helped. Sterling Holloway seemed too old, like an old man being Pooh.

ADAM This was so depressing because it was like the difference between drawing and tracing. It was actually quite faithful, literally, to the book, but it just felt…

BROOM It felt traced. I hear that. Those illustrations in the book — especially the watercolored ones — are really lovely, and these backgrounds looked just like the Shepard illustrations.

BETH I really liked the look of this.

ADAM Well, except that those illustrations have a slightly watery, hand-drawn quality, whereas these lines were too thick and the colors were too opaque.

BROOM Yes, the original illustrations are much nicer, and one of my clearest memories of reading my mother’s copy of “The World of Pooh,” the compendium edition, is that particular quality of color, that muted watercolory look. But this was definitely a rendition of it, and I give them points for doing that instead of, for example, what they did in the Winnie-the-Pooh Saturday morning cartoon that they made in the 90s, or whenever that was. Maybe there was a little hint of that look, but mostly it was just standard cartoon backgrounds.

ADAM Right, well, this wasn’t “Pooh Tales” (woo-ooo!), but… it was so depressing. Those books have a slight otherworldliness — like a Beatrix Potter fable-iness. This was just too literal.

BROOM I don’t disagree that this had problems and didn’t nail it, but still, somehow the weather of it, the way the trees looked, gave me a sense of this place as a clearly imagined place for a child. It looked like Hampstead Heath out there — I’m sure that’s what all the British countryside looks like — and like looking at a landscape painting, you have a certain fantasy of that world is, and I felt like it had the childlike quality that it was supposed to have.

ADAM But none of that is their doing.

BROOM It’s their doing to allow that to come across visually. In one of the many scenes in one of their little houses, when the characters were having a pointless conversation about nothing, which is what most of the action here is, and I thought about how as a child, you just watch that for what it is: then Tigger says this, then Pooh says that, then Tigger says this… I felt very comfortable watching things like that, where there’s no plot pushing it forward, there’s just a sequence of mundane events, of comfortable situations. That felt essentially childlike.

ADAM I want to come back to what I was saying earlier about Pooh being serious. As a child, part of what’s entertaining about it is that the characters are so obtuse that you can understand their motivations even when they can’t, and that’s part of what makes you feel like a grown-up. Even you, the child, can see that Rabbit is selfish, and Piglet is timid, and Owl is a pedant — but they can’t see that. And so you feel like Christopher Robin, which is to say affectionate and knowing toward these childish creatures, and that makes you feel good about yourself. But here…

BROOM I think it was like that here. Christopher Robin was the authority figure in these woods.

ADAM Well, yeah, everything here was literally the same as in the books, but they had trouble communicating the actual gravity with which these characters act. When Rabbit is in his hole and he’s got that cartoony cliché “exhausted” face, where his eyes are bloodshot and his teeth are chattering with exhaustion… it’s so like a Looney Tune, and it takes it out of the realm of grown-up seriousness and into the realm of cartoony, and the whole effect is ruined.

BROOM Fair enough. That reminds me that I was in a bookstore and picked up a book by Gilbert Seldes, the guy who wrote “The Seven Lively Arts,” but this was a book from later, and it had a section on Disney in it. And it was all about how his first few movies are great, but that Alice in Wonderland was a complete abomination, that Disney’s whole career had been building up to tackling that material, and by throwing out everything wonderful about the book in favor of American cartoony crap, he showed his true colors. And you’re saying something similar here. But I felt about this the way I felt about Alice in Wonderland, which is that of course it’s nothing like reading a book — it has none of the fineness of a book — but…

ADAM But the whole concept of this was “we are reading a book! We are looking at the original typesetting!” It’s openly playing on your nostalgia for the text in a way that Alice in Wonderland is not, so it has more of an obligation to be faithful. It just seemed caught between this desire to be a big blowsy Disney cartoon and the desire to play to the affection of those who liked the original, and it felt like a half-measure in a way that made me really upset. As soon as I saw that Pooh was that gruesome orange, I was like, “I can’t watch this.” And I was right!

BROOM So you truly had never seen any of this before?

ADAM I had seen it before. I just didn’t have very much taste as a child.

BROOM Everything you’re saying seems right to me, and so I think, “well, but I’m lowering my standards as we go, as befits the material!” My gut reaction to what you’re saying is, “why would I raise my standards that high?” But I guess Snow White, way back at the beginning of this, was a much more honorable rendition into film of the impression you get from a lovely book of fairy tales. And this definitely doesn’t feel like a book in that sense, but that’s a sense in which I don’t expect them to “get” a book at all. I just don’t expect that.

BETH Not knowing the books, I was mostly struck by how unlikable almost all the characters were.

BROOM Piglet?

BETH I liked Piglet fine…

ADAM No, Piglet’s a milquetoast.

BETH As a kid, I didn’t like Piglet because he seemed so wimpy. Eeyore I was always a fan of, although his voice in my head was different — so I guess I must have read the books a little bit.

ADAM Yeah, his voice was too way-out-there here.

BROOM I guess I spent more time with the book than I realize, because a lot of my favorite incidents, which I assumed I was going to see here, were not included. When Eeyore has his birthday that nobody remembers, and they give him a deflated balloon and he’s thrilled by it.

ADAM Winnie-the-Pooh is going to give him a honey pot, but he gets too greedy and eats all of it so he gives him an empty one, and then Eeyore puts the balloon into the pot and takes it out again, and then in, and then out…

BROOM And I remember than whenever I saw this as a child, the fact that you see heffalumps and woozles, even for a second, even in a dream, felt completely wrong. They shouldn’t have appearances, and if they do, they definitely shouldn’t just look like elephants and weasels. And he certainly shouldn’t say, “You mean elephants and weasels?” That seemed on the nose in a way that nobody needed.

ADAM And again, the point is that children aren’t as good at drawing inferences as grown-ups are, so when a child manages to draw an inference, it’s especially pleasurable. Which is why it has to be played so straight.

BROOM I don’t even want to think about what goes on in something like Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. The fact that Pooh has become one of their characters and one of their franchises is sad to me, in a way that this movie itself was not sad to me.

ADAM What if their next movie were “Peter Rabbit”? You know?

BROOM I would just accept it! The force of Disney I just accept, and the fact that they made their own thing, which is of course coarser and broader and vaudevillian where the original is touching, I accept. Yes, there’s a Disney version of it. I don’t even have emotions about that. I guess I should be questioning that, but it all becomes depressing once you question it.

BETH Well, you seem pretty predisposed to liking everything they do. I don’t know why. You are less judgmental about Disney movies than you are naturally. You come in with a less judgmental attitude than I think Adam or I do. You tend to be more delighted. I think it has to do with your childhood somehow.

BROOM Well, it probably does, but I also feel sympathetic to them because they exist. If there weren’t this, there would be no animated film of Winnie-the-Pooh. And that seems like a great idea, to make an animated film of it. Did they do it in a commercialized way? Yes, they did. But yeah, I love animated movies. It doesn’t get done very much, and it especially doesn’t get done with care and attention very much.

ADAM Yeah, this is better than “The Jetsons.”

BROOM That’s right. There just aren’t very many such things. I know it’s taking us forever to get through them so it seems like a ton of material, but there really are only these Disney movies and then those Don Bluth ones that are a step below even this…

BETH Two steps below.

ADAM What about, like, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones?

BROOM I mean features. I mean, yes, there are cartoons — there’s tons and tons of animation out there… And of course there’s all the art animation, which I generally think is superior to this.

ADAM Well, wait until we get to Howl’s Moving Castle.

BROOM We’re not going to.

ADAM I know. But it gets better when we get to Beauty and the Beast, too.

BROOM But it’s never going to get fundamentally better. It’s always going to be middlebrow; it’s never going to get to the point where anything about it is really fine again.

ADAM There’s no Seven Samurai.

BROOM That’s a weird example, because when I finally saw that, I thought, “That was Seven Samurai?” But yeah, there’s not going to be a Citizen Kane.

ADAM Well, Steven Spielberg called “One Froggy Evening” “the Citizen Kane of animated shorts.”

BETH It really is great!

ADAM Is this the end of Sterling Holloway?

BROOM Yes.

ADAM His quavery reign is over!

BETH The songs in this felt really old-fashioned, if you were paying attention. Like, forties-style songs.

BROOM I thought that was to make them seem simplistic and childlike. And given that, since they’re doing the Disney version, they’re of course going to have to set all those goofy little poems, I thought they weren’t so bad.

BETH No, I liked them!

ADAM I guess I must have seen this several times, because I remember singing to myself “Winnie-the-Pooh, Winnie-the-Pooh…”

BROOM Oh, I sing it all the time even now.

BETH There were just some songs in the middle that weren’t very catchy but had such an authentic forties sound. If people were doing a forties sound now, you’d think, “oh, that was trashy.” I don’t think they would do it as authentically.

BROOM I don’t know what you mean by “forties.” They all just seemed childlike to me. Which one?

BETH I don’t remember, but it had a chorus…

BROOM Oh, “Down in the Hundred Acre Wood, where Christopher Robin plays…” ?

BETH Yeah.

BROOM That’s the verse of “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

BETH It was impressive to me that that was done in the mid-seventies.

BROOM Well, that one was done in the sixties.

ADAM Yes, we can be grateful that Pooh does not ride in a rocketship, that Pooh does not join a Beatles-like band of vultures….

BETH That he doesn’t show up in a Hawaiian shirt.

BROOM Yeah! Think about all the restraint it took to make it like this!

[We spend 10 minutes attempting to find the original New York Times review as usual, but it seems there was none!]