24. The Fox and the Hound (1981)

The first of the 1980’s and an attempt at somewhat of a new beginning for Disney, The Fox and the Hound takes somewhat of a different approach, while still containing some familiar Disney touches. The most expensive film Disney had made to date, The Fox and the Hound ups the animation quality and tackles a more serious and mature subject matter than any film Disney had for quite some time. Despite its ambitions, however, The Fox and the Hound is not quite able to live up to these lofty goals, though it clearly has the best of intentions.

The film FINALLY does away with the xerography technique and as a result, the animation here looks much cleaner, softer and more reminiscent of the early Disney films. While it doesn’t exactly develop any revolutionary style, The Fox and the Hound is a very nice looking film with some good animation; while some of the character designs are definitely similar to some of the more recent, stylised ones we’ve looked at, they are a little more rounded and refined and, in my opinion, strike a nice balance between Disney’s early and later styles. The character animation is really good, there are no sketchy slip-ups or awkward movements that we have seen in the last few films, things are really controlled, as well as being energised, lively and just plain fun; emotion is really effectively expressed and communicated through the character’s facial expressions and movements, often without the need of any dialogue and some of the more action-packed sequences are animated so expertly that they really do become very gripping and intense. The backgrounds are also great, as always Disney show off just how great they are at creating natural, pastoral landscapes – woods and forests really are their speciality. This is the best animation Disney has done in years and, while The Fox and the Hound doesn’t exactly forge a visual identity of its own, it does manage to take some of the best parts of other films in order to create a pleasant, if familiar visual style.

‘Copper, I don’t think we can be friends anymore, cos hound dogs are kind of naturally bred to hunt foxes’

‘Oh my God Tod, not all hound dogs stop trying to spread your agenda’ 

The story is simplistic, but effective, rather than being centred around an involved plot or even really the titular characters, it is more focused on its singular theme – prejudice is harmful and pointless and society should never tell someone who they are or who they’re allowed to associate with. It’s a simple and obvious moral, one that has been covered time and again by many other works, from way back to Romeo and Juliet, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. The film takes a lot from Bambi, from its setting, to its more mature attitude and the way in which in charts the growth and life of a young animal (in this case two) and how their environment shapes them. While The Fox and the Hound is not as mature or delicate as Bambi and isn’t able to make its point quite as subtly – there are a couple of times where it puts the moral of the film a little too clearly on display – it is usually not too crass and upfront about its message and is generally quite effective. Though there is some good dialogue, particularly the line ‘Forever is a long, long time. And time has a way of changing things.’ The film is generally better at communicating its message without the use of dialogue; some of the most powerful moments of the film are done just through facial expressions and body language alone. These include Tod’s crestfallen look after he discovers he and Copper can no longer be friends and the ending of the film, where Copper is able to communicate just how much Tod means to him to his master simply by stepping in front of him and giving him a purposeful, but vulnerable look. The opening sequence of the movie is also done without any dialogue and is probably the best part of the whole film – it opens on absolute silence, something totally new for a Disney film and slowly pans across the dark and quiet forest before suddenly exploding into sound and movement as we follow Tod’s mother, rushing across the forest in a desperate attempt to escape a hunter. When Tod’s mother is finally killed, she is done so in the exact same manner as Bambi’s mother – she escapes off-screen, but we hear two gunshots and we know she didn’t make it; while moments like this perhaps take a little too much from Bambi, the film never outright copies it and always manages to retain its own identity with great sequences such as this one.

The pacing of the movie and its general use of time are unfortunately a little off; while the first half of the movie takes place during Tod and Copper’s childhood, the development of their friendship feels a little rushed and thus the severity of their maturity and the impact of their subsequent rivalry doesn’t feel quite as strong or believable as it should be. There is also a strangely large amount of time dedicated to a subplot about two birds chasing a caterpillar, that seems to be there purely for comic relief; the scenes are harmless and kind of cute, but they do end up feeling a little intrusive and take up time that could’ve been better used developing Tod and Copper’s friendship. I suppose this sub-plot does eventually kind of tie into the greater themes of the movie, as the helpless and frightened caterpillar eventually becomes a beautiful butterfly that can fly away from its tormentors, who no longer recognise it as their victim, perhaps representing the film’s central ideas of maturity, change and that nature and society don’t determine who you or your enemies are, but this is probably reading into things a little too much. Generally, the movie just engages in a few too many sequences that don’t really feel necessary or, at least, feel less necessary than the development of Tod and Copper’s friendship; a decent amount of the last third is dedicated to Tod’s sudden romance with another fox named Vixey and while these scenes are pretty good, they don’t really tie into the film’s greater narrative purpose. The opening and ending sequences of the film are really when things are at their best, the tense chase between Tod’s mother and the hunter in the beginning is matched by the equally tense chase between Tod and Vixey and Amos and Copper in the ending; this sequence actually becomes very dramatic, particularly in the rather brutal fight between Copper and Tod and the bear, which becomes surprisingly violent for a Disney film and honestly quite frightening for children. The middle, or rather, the majority of the film is unfortunately not as good as the beginning or end, but it’s still good and sets things up for the ending nicely; the central idea of the film is probably better than the execution of that idea, but it’s still executed well enough.

The birds constantly trying to kill and eat a caterpillar kinda undermines the whole “nature doesn’t dictate who our enemies are” thing, huh?

The characters are mostly just okay, they are mostly cute and fun but not really very interesting, young Tod and Copper are great representations of young kids and perfectly capture that sense of adventure, curiosity and spontaneity in children; once they become adults, they are still pretty likeable, but not quite as well characterised. Mickey Rooney’s voice acting for older Tod is a little over-the-top for me, he just seems to be trying a little too hard; ordinarily, you’d think Rooney’s more exaggerated style would be perfect for an animated movie, but for a generally more mature and serious story like The Fox and the Hound, it doesn’t quite work. Kurt Russell is a lot better as older Copper and effectively juggles his energetic optimism and tortured anger, he sounds a lot more like a real actor than Rooney, who, despite clearly trying hard, comes off much more like a guy trying to do the voice of a cartoon fox than a guy just trying to play his part. The side characters are fine, if mostly unmemorable: Dinky, Boomer and Squeeks are just the goofy comic relief, Big Mama is friendly and well acted, but a little dull, Widow Tweed is fine but just doesn’t get much time, there are a couple of other animals that Tod meets in the forest who don’t do much interesting either, the supporting cast just doesn’t do that much in this film. Chief is one of the more prominent supporting characters, but just seems a little too similar to previous characters, particularly the Sherriff of Nottingham, with whom he shares a voice actor and quite a similar facial design and personality; the hunter, Amos Slade gets some time to be interesting too, he’s one of the better ones. Of all the supporting characters, I found Vixey to be most interesting, though she appears only briefly, she’s very well animated and acted and is very likeable and sweet. She has this great sense of personality and attitude and it’s a shame she doesn’t appear until the last twenty minutes of the movie, as it leaves her as kind of an after-thought and her romance with Tod just feels very shoehorned in at the last minute, rather than a natural development; still, she’s very enjoyable in the few scenes she does appear in.

The songs are weird, several of them aren’t even really sung so much as just spoken by the characters, with the words just happening to rhyme. A few are sung properly, but are still not traditional musical numbers, they’re just songs sung over scenes of the characters playing or exploring or what have you. They all sound pretty much the same as well, none of them are very good and the lyrics are at times laughably lazy; really quite disappointing, with many of the more recent Disney films we’ve looked at, particularly ones such as this and The Rescuers, the songs aren’t done in a traditional musical format and so just really don’t feel like they need to be there at all. Why did Disney keep forcing in songs that they clearly didn’t want to do? Perhaps it was just because they felt that they had to, because that’s what Disney was known for, but either way they should’ve stopped because in examples like this, they just do not seem necessary and ultimately end up hurting the movie and wasting time that could be better spent on other things.

THAT’S why a bear can rest at ease

The Fox and the Hound is a movie with a familiar, but solid idea at its core and a lot of potential to be a mature and very different movie for Disney; while it doesn’t quite live up to this potential, it still feels quite different to most Disney films before it and even though it is not as good as Bambi, which it clearly takes a lot of inspiration from, it does manage to capture some of its magic. The movie is very sweet, very moving and though its moral about prejudice and social division is a simple and traditional one, it is still a necessary one that is just as relevant today and, despite a few ham-fisted moments, the message is delivered quite effectively. Not the best songs, not the best characters, but a good story and some very good animation make The Fox and the Hound a film that shouldn’t be easily forgotten.



Other Thoughts:

• Man people are pretty reckless with the use of firearms in Disney movies

‘Go ahead punk, make my day’

• Oh yeah and look how terrifying Tod looks here

Stupider like a FOX

6.5/10

Next Week: The Black Cauldron!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com

Twitter: @JSChilds

23. The Rescuers (1977)

The Rescuers seems to be a film of many milestones – released the same year as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, it marked the end of the 70’s and with it, the end of Disney’s era of xerography animation. This also marked the end of the more overly comic style that had dominated Disney’s features since One Hundred and One Dalmatians, returning to a more serious and dramatic adventure. While all of these are admirable accomplishments and many agree that The Rescuers helped breathe new life into Disney, which was slowly becoming very stale and forgettable, I don’t quite agree; though it’s obvious that The Rescuers helped signal the start of a new era for Disney (though not a particularly successful one), when viewed on its own merits, it seems to me that the film knows the direction it wants to take things in, but doesn’t quite get there itself.

While still utilising the xerography technique, The Rescuers has all but done away with that rough and scratchy style and mostly returned to the traditionally more soft and rounded look of the earlier Disney films. While this is nice to see again, there’s nothing else especially interesting about the animation, it’s perfectly fine, but doesn’t really stand out much; a couple of things are really well animated, particularly Madame Medusa and her pet alligators, but for the most part things are a little dry. The same goes for the character designs, while again, a couple of characters are well designed, most of them are a bit boring – the mice in particular have a very dull and generic look and don’t have much detail or personality to them and Penny’s is so typical she may as well be wearing a big sign reading “I AM AN ORPHAN”. Even some of the better designs are pretty derivative, Medusa has a lot of detail and character to her design and animation, but she’s such an obvious retread of Cruella De Vil and Madam Mim (Right down to the alliterative “M” name and being called Madam!) that it’s hard to really get enthused about her; there’s even a scene when she’s driving a car like mad and we zoom in on her face just like Cruella, it’s pretty lazy. The backgrounds at least are very nice, detailed and drawn in an almost surreal manner – the setting of the film really does look great, it’s just a shame not much else really does.

She drives like cra- oh wait we’ve done this one 

The premise for the story is actually quite interesting: a group of mice from around the world who call themselves the Rescue Aid Society send two of their agents, Bernard and Bianca, out on a mission to rescue an orphan girl called Penny. The idea of the Rescue Aid Society is pretty interesting and the few moments we get to see of their organisation are probably the best parts of the movie; there are some clever gags like having the founder be the mouse who pulled a thorn out of a lion’s paw, some fun interactions between the different mice and the insight we get into how their organisation works is quite fascinating. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really focus on this and soon gets Bernard and Bianca out into the world, a shame, because I think the film would’ve been a lot better if it went more into the rules and history of the Rescue Aid Society and showed us a little more of how it worked. The rest of the movie sounds like it should be pretty exciting too, the mice end up in a swamp called the Devil’s Bayou where they have to rescue Penny, who is being held captive on an abandoned river boat by the evil Madame Medusa, who wants her to find a precious diamond called the Devil’s Eye. That’s a really cool and interesting setting and indeed, as said before, the Devil’s Bayou looks great – the mysterious swamp, the old riverboat, the cave where Penny has to search for the diamond, they’re all very striking visuals and create a strong and vivid atmosphere. On the face of it, this seems like a really exciting story with some interesting and original ideas, but somehow, it just isn’t as good in execution as it is in theory, the film is plagued by bad pacing, poorly developed characters and a constant slew of dull and pointless sequences.

The movie takes way too long to get started and wastes far too much time setting up the story – Bernard and Bianca don’t reach the Devil’s Bayou until over half an hour in and don’t meet Penny until an HOUR in; considering the whole point of the story is supposed to be their rescue of Penny, it’s pretty unbelievable that they meet her an hour into a film that is only an hour and seventeen minutes long. This wouldn’t be as bad if Bernard and Bianca’s adventures on the way to the Devil’s Bayou were exciting, if there was significant reason why they take so long to get to Penny or if we saw more of Penny’s struggles alongside them, but no. Much of the first half is taken up with a kind of mystery story of Bernard and Bianca trying to find out where Penny is; this is a perfectly good idea and could’ve made for a great build up to an exciting climax, but the whole idea of the mystery is undermined by the fact that the audience knows from minute one of the movie exactly where Penny is and the clues are so easily spread out for Bernard and Bianca that they should figure things out a lot faster than they do. A lot of time is wasted on the way with pointless scenes like Bernard and Bianca deciding to cut through a zoo, before turning back and going another way because Bernard sees a lion; while a couple of these can be justified as developing or better introducing the characters, many of them just seem to be lazy attempts at dragging the movie out a little longer. The level of filler here is hardly egregious compared to Cinderella or The Aristocats, but there are still too many scenes that go nowhere, add very little to the story and go on for far too long, as in Robin Hood, making it very difficult for the film to hold you interest.

Right around this point in the original cut you’d be seeing a naked woman in the window 

(Seriously, look it up)

The characters are mostly pretty bland; Bernard and Bianca have some personality and chemistry, but don’t really get much time or opportunity to show it. Although Bianca is pretty much exactly the same character as Duchess from The Aristocats, right down to being voiced by Eva Gabor, you can forgive this as she was one of the only good things about that movie and brings the same energy and spirit to this one; Eva Gabor really is a very good voice actress, she brings so much life and personality to the character, it really feels like the animated character is the one saying the words and acting, rather than matching the words of some person in a recording booth. Bernard is also quite well voiced by veteran comedian Bob Newhart, who brings his classically nervous, stammering delivery to the character and helps cement Bernard as an anxious everyman; these two voices really are the perfect fit for the characters and really help shape them. It’s also nice that they get to spend a whole movie together to build their relationship and, while it doesn’t exactly develop prominently in the foreground as effectively as Lady in the Tramp, it is downplayed and subtle enough that it works and comes off as believable, rather than in The Aristocats. Sadly, the other characters don’t really have any of these good points – Penny is the typical cutesy Disney kid, she can’t talk properly, she carries a stuffed animal around etc. etc. The villains are fantastically generic, Medusa being, as said before, a very obvious Cruella De Vil knockoff with a little Madam Mim thrown in and her sidekick is... well a sidekick. He’s a goofy, incompetent henchman there to engage in slapstick with his boss, he’s Smee, he’s Sir Hiss, he’s Jasper and Horace the list goes on. The other animals are an equally derivative collection of random townspeople, an old turtle, a plucky mole, a laid-back rabbit, a lazy mouse, it’s the cast of Nottingham in Robin Hood, it’s the other animals in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, again, the list goes on. Though there are a couple of standout characters such as the alligators, Brutus and Nero and a dragonfly named Evinrude, it says a lot that these are the only characters that don’t speak and yet they’re the only ones that are any fun; the cast of this movie is just really lacking in personality.

The music is quite frankly, bizarre, the score is pretty good and the main theme in particular is very nice, a dark tune that helps solidify the dangerous and mysterious atmosphere of the swamp; however, the songs are very odd. They are not traditional musical numbers, but aren’t really little tunes or narrative songs, either, they’re all just kind of sad... I don’t even know what to call them, maybe folk songs? They don’t sound like Disney songs at all, they sound like Joni Mitchell songs, or maybe songs from some of Don Bluth’s later, weaker films (Which I suppose makes sense, Don Bluth did work on this movie). Either way, I don’t think they fit the style of the film at all and as a result, they’re quite distracting and, more importantly, just not very good.

‘Nero do you think ours and our master’s character designs are just gonna be recycled to be a couple of eels and an octopus lady about 12 years down the line?’

‘You know Brutus, I’m starting to think you don’t really believe in this project.’

The Rescuers is a movie with a lot of potential, but a weak delivery – the central premise is intriguing and unique, but lost in a sea of bad pacing and poor narrative structure. Though the central characters are likeable and interesting, time that could’ve been spent developing their characters is unfortunately spent on ultimately unnecessary scenes and introducing a wider cast of boring supporting characters and completely unmemorable villains. The setting and atmosphere for the movie are great, but they are wasted by just not having anything very interesting happen and the tone they help to set is damaged by the boring and entirely ill-suited songs. Though you can be dragged in to the plight of Penny and feel for her emotionally, her overly cutesy attitude often comes off as excessively sentimental and manipulative, making it hard to really care about the outcome. The Rescuers has a lot of good ideas with a lot of poor execution, it’s not a terrible movie, but it’s not a very good one either.

Other Thoughts:

• 10 More Things You Definitely Never Knew About Disney: Bambi’s Mother AND Bambi are in this one guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMG someone get Buzzfeed back on the phone I need to submit my fourteen word, eighty gif theory piece on how The Rescuers, Bambi, Frozen and Pete’s Dragon all take place in the same universe!!!!!!!

• Also there’s a bird, he’s lame

Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

4.5/10

Next Week: The Fox and the Hound!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com

Twitter: @JSChilds

22. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

Between 1966  and 1974, Disney released three animated shorts based on A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. In 1977, they decided to combine these shorts together into one full length feature, the aptly titled The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. The last full length animated feature Walt Disney had any involvement in before his death, his presence is felt in this heart warming family classic, which manages to capture some of the Disney magic that has been missing in the last couple features we’ve looked at.

Winnie the Pooh once again uses the xerography technique for animation, but thankfully, it manages to put a fresh spin on things that has been sorely needed; the lines are still a little scratchy and rough, but have been mostly refined and softened out as much as possible to suit the movie’s tone. The style works well with the more simplistic designs of most of the characters, the animation itself is always good and in some instances – particularly in the very lively and, appropriately, bouncy animation of Tigger – it’s great. The backgrounds are similarly basic and stylised, they are simple, but elegant, their rough style effectively communicates the idea that the characters exist within a storybook and, in my opinion, it captures the similarly scratchy illustrations of E.H. Shepard from the original books very well. The film has a lot of very nice colours, interesting little attentions to detail and overall is just very nice to look at, it really is like reading a living picture book, the images don’t leap off the page, but rather, it feels like they are moving within the pages itself – the book and all its characters feel really alive.

‘Tigger do you really have to tackle me and introduce yourself every time we see each other?’

‘Hi, Pooh! I’m Tigger!’

‘Son of a bitch, Tigger.’

The film has no real story, a necessary result of it being a collection of three previously independent shorts, however, it does do a very good job of tying the film together through a number of new scenes which leads each short into the next and a new short is added to the end to round the movie out. This is done very effectively, this movie is much more tied together than Robin Hood, for example and that’s a movie that’s supposed to just have one, singular plot line rather than three different stories it had to tie together; the shorts certainly all exist independently, but thankfully are all good in their own right and the idea that the film is a storybook being read by a narrator means that the transitions between each short never feel awkward or distracting. There’s not much more to say about it really, I suppose if I had to choose a favourite individual short it would be Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too but they’re all quite good and the final one is very sweet and poignant as well, ending the film on a surprisingly mature and melancholy note about the finite nature of childhood and the fact that one day we all must grow up.

The characters are, of course, classic, everyone knows these guys, what do I really have to say? Bumbling and absent-minded, but well-intentioned and friendly Pooh, anxious and adorable Piglet, energetic and fun-loving Tigger, pompous and often humourously mistaken Owl, melancholy and pessimistic Eeyore, long suffering and overly polite Rabbit... they’re all pretty loveable. They are pretty simple characters, Kanga, Roo and Christopher Robin in particular really don’t have anything interesting about them, but to be fair they aren’t around for that much of the film. I also never really cared for Gopher, who I find a little annoying and Tigger can be obnoxious at times in Disney’s attempts to make him the big breakout member of the cast (Hey, they pretty much succeeded!) but he never becomes The Hooter or anything and he’s usually pretty likeable. My favourite character is Rabbit, the poor guy just suffers so much just from trying to be a nice guy, I like how much Pooh takes advantage of his hospitality and yet without even really knowing he’s doing so, he’s so naive he just thinks Rabbit’s happy to give him all his food even though he’s very clearly trying to give Pooh hints, it’s great. I also like that Rabbit starts off in his first appearance as rather grounded compared to most of the other characters, if a little neurotic, but after a film of having to deal with Pooh, Tigger and Owl he finally snaps and just loses it, it’s great. Again, the storybook theme is very present with this colourful and memorable cast of classic storybook characters.

Rabbit admiring Pooh’s ass 

(This isn’t even really out of context or anything, that’s actually just what he’s doing) 

The music is very nice; the score in particular is always very good and effective, incorporating rearrangements of many of the songs with original music to match each moment perfectly. The songs themselves are presented a little differently here, most of them just being little tunes the characters sing every now and again, rather than big musical numbers. Though there are a few too many of these cutesy little songs – Pooh sings about four in the first ten or fifteen minutes – most of them are pretty good, the opening song “Winnie the Pooh” itself is, of course, very memorable and such a great little tune that at this point it’s probably impossible to picture Pooh without hearing it. The best song is “Heffalumps and Woozles”, which is highly reminiscent of “Pink Elephants on Parade” – okay, so it’s ENTIRELY reminiscent of “Pink Elephants on Parade” – with its surreal imagery, bright colours, dark but jaunty rhythm and playful lyrics. The whole sequence is great, it’s just so fun to watch and listen to, the whole thing calls Dr. Seuss to mind, particularly in its lyrics, which utilise near-nonsense words to make fun and interesting rhymes. This fits much better than “Pink Elephants on Parade” in Dumbo, which really didn’t fit into the story or style of the movie whatsoever and was just there as an excuse for the animators to have some fun; while “Heffalumps and Woozles” is just as random, it fits much better into a segmented movie like Winnie the Pooh, which combines a number of different disconnected side stories. Either way, “Heffalumps and Woozles” is great fun and pretty undoubtedly the best part of the movie; even if it is pretty much exactly the same as “Pink Elephants on Parade” in every way it can be, there’s not many better sequences it could have copied.

Pink Heffalumps on Parade

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is definitely a film for young children, it’s very sweet and kind and soothing, but also rather simplistic; I don’t wish to take anything away from it, as it is a good film, but there’s not much for an adult to sink their teeth into. The art style and animation of the movie are really nice and some sequences like “Heffalumps and Woozles” are so great they transcend any age barriers, but on the whole, the film is definitely for kids. That’s not to say that adults can’t enjoy it, in fact I find it difficult to imagine anyone not enjoying this at least on some level, no matter their age, but it keeps things relatively light and straightforward in order to serve its storybook theme. Still, Winnie the Pooh does manage to inject a well needed shot of creativity into Disney’s animation and it creates a very memorable world and cast of characters; after several films featuring an animation style that started to lose its charm pretty quickly and two disappointing features, Winnie the Pooh manages to restore a little bit of that Disney magic – it’s not a great movie, but it was a necessary one. 

6.5/10

Next Week: The Rescuers!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com

Twitter: @JSChilds

21. Robin Hood (1973)

Next was Robin Hood, an adaptation of the classic English legends, with a cast of anthropomorphic animals; perhaps afraid of making anything as grandiose or costly as Sleeping Beauty again, Disney continues its run of relatively standard comedies here, but the humour is starting to wear thin and the repeated ideas are becoming a lot more obvious. Robin Hood is certainly a step up from The Aristocats and at least has some sense of personality, but unfortunately, a lot of that is on loan from other, better films.

Disney continues to use the xerography technique of animation and, while a little cleaned up from The Aristocats, it’s getting very boring to look at now; the last five films have all looked very similar and Robin Hood really doesn’t change anything whatsoever. As a matter of fact, it’s very easy to think of Robin Hood as simply The Jungle Book in a forest, especially in terms of its visual style – the character designs are all heavily reminiscent of those seen in The Jungle Book, particularly the vultures, Sir Hiss, who is obviously based on Kaa and, most egregiously, Little John, who is just Baloo coloured in differently. There are actually points where the film copies entire sequences of animation from The Jungle Book, most noticeably when Sir Hiss tries to calm Prince John down and they just repurpose animation of Kaa hypnotising Mowgli; I understand that Disney’s budget at the time would have been tight and they needed to cut corners whenever they could, but when it gets that obvious it becomes distracting and really pulls you out of the movie. The backgrounds are fine, but not really up to scratch considering how good Disney’s pastoral, natural backgrounds usually are, seen in films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi, but these more simplistic backgrounds fit the more stylised animation style better, I suppose. The character animation is good and all and there aren’t really any prominent flubs or slip-ups, but there’s just nothing really special here, nothing new or different, it takes so much from the last few films, The Jungle Book in particular, that Robin Hood’s animation and visual style really has no identity of its own.

I mean really, take off the hat and it’s just Kaa, come on

 

The story is very loose, the movie isn’t really based around a central plot so much as it is an environment – Sherwood Forest, a place where all the different characters can flit through and bump into one another for different comedic scenes. This is a perfectly fine idea, but unlike say, the jungle in The Jungle Book, you don’t get much of a sense of Sherwood Forest as a place, you only really see two or three areas of it; even though it’s an animated movie, Robin Hood feels very limited in its scope, it feels like a live action movie that only had two sets and had to really disguise that fact in order to try and build a larger environment, but didn’t really do a very good job of it, as the whole world feels very small, claustrophobic and lifeless – the movie really doesn’t take advantage of the unique benefits that come with being animated. These problems are exacerbated by the film’s biggest issue, its pacing; the movie feels very aimless and confused, it meanders from moment to moment with very little cohesion between scenes, only occasionally stumbling onto something that might be important. Scenes trundle on for much longer than they need to, many of them start out relatively interesting or entertaining, but then seem to keep going far past the point where they should have ended, before undeniably overstaying their welcome and then just kind of trailing off at a seemingly random point. I don’t understand how scenes were just allowed to drag on like this, so many should have the last five or so minutes shaved off, but I suppose that would have cut the running time down too heavily, so I guess I have my answer as to why they did this. These artificial attempts to drag out the running time really hurt the movie and make it feel completely unsure of itself or what it’s trying to say, even when scenes do start out pretty good, they invariably lose steam and drag on for as long as they possibly can.

Coppin’ Hood

The characters are a very generic collection of animal stereotypes – the sly and cunning fox, the strong but gentle bear, the cruel and predatory wolf, the cute and innocent rabbit, the intelligent but clumsy turtle etc. etc. – that are, on top of that, mostly copied from other Disney movies. Robin Hood himself owes quite a lot to Peter Pan, he’s a loveable rogue and trickster who seems to enjoy tormenting his pathetic and ineffectual nemesis, he’s very theatrical and a bit of a show-off, he’s adventurous and a drifter, even his character design borrows from Peter Pan, from the tunic and feathered cap to the colour scheme of green and orange; Robin is perfectly likeable and can be fun to watch, but he’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Little John is, as said before, just Baloo – he has the same basic character design, the EXACT same personality and, like the previous Baloo clone, O’Malley, he has the voice of Baloo, Phil Harris; thankfully this was the last time Disney tried to outright copy Baloo’s character right down to the voice, because it was getting a little embarrassing by this point. Most of the other characters are just generic, dull nice guys: Maid Marian is boring, Friar Tuck is boring, all the townspeople are boring; most noticeably the children are the stereotype of Disney children to a tee, they’re just there to be cutesy and for the youngest one to not even be able to speak properly, it’s the same old stuff from Peter Pan, The Aristocats, One Hundred and One Dalmatians and so on. There is Lady Kluck, a lively and boisterous Scottish chicken, but unfortunately she’s not as fun as she sounds and is really just kind of annoying.

Urkel the Turtle

The villains are a little better, at least in terms of having some personality – the Sherri ff of Nottingham is probably the best character in the film, he is well voiced by Pat Buttram, whose Southern twang someone manages to be much less annoying than it was in The Aristocats and instead be quite funny and charming. The voice perfectly fits the Sherriff as this sleazy, two faced kind of guy, who acts like he’s your friend but clearly just wants to fleece you for everything you’re worth and loves doing it; it’s great, he’s such a slime ball. Sir Hiss, on the other hand, is just kind of annoying and unfunny, him and Prince John have a very generic double act shtick reminiscent of Captain Hook and Smee, Jasper and Horace and a whole lot of others, it just isn’t very funny. Prince John is just too lame to be threatening or funny, he’s just pathetic; like Edgar from The Aristocats or, again, Captain Hook, who he is pretty heavily based on, Prince John is just a loser and a wimp, who exists purely to be shown up by Robin Hood, rather than to pose any real danger. I guess this is fine, considering the film is supposed to be a comedy, but unfortunately, it’s just not very funny, so Prince John just comes off as too sad – constantly sucking his thumb, screaming and crying out for his Mummy, he’s just way too over-the-top to be entertaining.

Wimoweh

There aren’t many songs, but the few that are there are quite well done, if rather forgettable; ‘Oo-De-Lally’ is kind of like a folk song, while ‘Not in Nottingham’ is more like a melancholy, country number. “Love” is actually really quite a nice song that seems a bit more modern than the others, almost ahead of its time and it creates a very nice atmosphere, but neither it nor the aforementioned two are really musical numbers. The closest to a traditional musical number in the film is “The Phony Old King of England”, which is pretty upbeat, but just not that fun to listen to and definitely not memorable. I think it would have been pretty interesting if the movie had been set around one of these styles, making Robin Hood a kind of country or folk music themed film, in the same way that The Jungle Book is themed around jazz, but as it is, the songs are too few and too varied in style to really pull together as one.

Robin Hood is a pretty bland movie, it falls into that familiar problem of aspiring to be cute and silly, but not much else; the animals are definitely cutesy and goofy, but they have very little soul or personality to them. There is no real story or character arc, nothing and no-one is ever really taken seriously or given much weight or depth, it’s just one silly scene after the other, each one dragging on and on for far longer than it needs to, making most of the film very boring and difficult to watch. It’s not a terrible movie, the animation is decent, the colours are nice, some of the characters are pretty likeable, if a bit dull and there are a couple of sequences that are really quite good, particularly Robin’s escape from the castle in the film’s climax; unfortunately, the negatives outweigh the positives in this lazy, average and forgettable film. 

Other Thoughts:

• The reuse of animation really is quite bad, they use this walk cycle of the Sherriff of Nottingham at least four times!

This scene is literally immediately after the exact same walk cycle, just from a different angle! Scandalous

5/10

Next Week: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com

Twitter: @JSChilds

20. The Aristocats (1970)

The Aristocats was the first Disney animated movie to be released after Walt Disney’s death and his absence is definitely felt in this confused, awkward and disappointing feature. The Aristocats is a film that seems to be built entirely on a pun, with an attitude of ‘Eh, we’ll just make up the rest along the way’; it fills the rest of the movie out with pointless filler, while borrowing heavily from any previous Disney film it can along the way, focusing especially on two or three. The result is a confusing mess lacking any sense of heart, drive, or purpose, an empty shell of a movie propped up with unfunny slapstick and boring character stereotypes. And besides, the pun wasn’t even that good to begin with.

Once again, the xerography technique of animation is used (like I said, it lasted a while) and by this point, it’s really getting boring to look at; the first use of it in 101 Dalmatians was so new and visually striking that it worked, it got along alright for the next two films but by this point, I’m growing kind of sick of looking at it. On top of that, this may very well be the roughest the animation has looked yet, perhaps even moreso than in its debut in 101 Dalmatians; the lines are so thick and scratchy it frequently looks as if we’re just looking at the animator’s most basic of sketches that simply haven’t been cleaned up at all. Like I said, the first appearance of this technique may have looked new and interesting, but Disney knew it couldn’t ride on that novelty and had to clean things up a bit and at least make it look a little more professional, there are slip ups and rough lines in The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book but nothing on the level we see here. The animation for The Aristocats just comes off as lazy and stagnant, as it seems to get worse than what we’ve seen before, rather than better; some of the characters look better than others, Duchess in particular is quite well animated, but for the most part things are rather weak.

The character designs go hand in hand with the animation style, they’re the same kind of angular, more stylised models etc. etc. we’ve seen this enough by this point too, there really is no creativity to them, they look exactly like the casts of 101 Dalmatians and, to a lesser extent, The Jungle Book, really nothing new; honestly, I think some of them, particularly O’Malley, Edgar, Roquefort and the two dogs, are borderline ugly. Once again the backgrounds are rather nice – though to be honest, it’s pretty hard to make Paris look ugly – but they don’t really gel with the character models, on more than one occasion you can very clearly see the separation between the characters and the backgrounds, which looks distracting and amateurish. The colours are all kind of dull and washed out, everything looks like it’s been put through a dark filter or had a large shadow cast over it, leaving its colours without any zest or vibrancy and making the whole film rather visually unappealing. At the end of the day, it’s Disney, so the animation is rarely going to be objectively terrible and there are some nice aspects to it here, but it’s certainly below their standard of quality.

‘Now my pets, let’s try and pretend I have a real family so that I can cover up my crushing loneliness and ignore the fact that I’ve wasted my entire life.’

The story is one of the laziest and poorly structured we’ve seen yet, it can’t seem to decide if it wants to be Lady and the Tramp with cats or 101 Dalmatians with cats, but it certainly wants to be one of them; the setting of the movie, in early 20^th Century Paris, is far too similar in look and feel to the settings in these previous films, being American suburbia and London, in the same timeframe, respectively. It borrows liberally from both film’s stories, from 101 Dalmatians it takes the group of lost animals trying to find their way home from the country side, while getting help from a cast of other kooky animals along the way and from Lady and the Tramp the budding romance between a pampered house pet from a rich family and a tough, streetwise stray. By trying to cram these two stories together, along with a number of pointless subplots, the film has no time to properly develop either one; though there is a clear plotline – O’Malley is trying to get Duchess and the kittens back to Paris – this story is never well developed in and of itself, it never becomes an exciting adventure or a fun road movie, things are just constantly sidetracked by other characters, so as to ensure the cats don’t reach Paris before the film has hit the eighty minute mark. 

I mean really think about it, what is the point of this movie? What is its narrative arc? Well let’s look at the kinds of things you might expect from this kind of story, considering what we’ve seen in films like the aforementioned 101 Dalmatians or Lady and the Tramp, as well as other films that use this kind of formula; perhaps the main arc of the movie belongs to Duchess and the kittens, whose experiences in the country side, where they must fend for themselves, cause them to grow from pampered and naive house pets into more independent and fully rounded characters who are able to take care of themselves and get a new perspective on life? No, the characters are guided and constantly rescued by O’Malley from day one, they never learn to take care of themselves, they never gain any new skills or opinions, they are helpless and naive right up until the climax, where they are once again captured by Edgar and need O’Malley’s help; the closest any of them come to character development is that Duchess learns to call O’Malley’s home a “pad” and likes jazz. Brilliant. Well, what about O’Malley? Maybe the movie is all about him learning to care about others, to go from a selfish loner, who drifts from place to place, to a caring and mature father figure, with a definite home. Again, no, because all this development seems to take place completely within O’Malley’s very first scene – he hits on Duchess, gets a little scared off when he finds out she has kids, but then realises he should help her out anyway and immediately makes the switch from loner alley cat to caring family man, with no room for any further development. There is a point late in the film where O’Malley says ‘All those little kids Duchess, I love ‘em’ to which I had to ask, why? They never seem to have any meaningful interactions, there is no development of their relationship, he just seems to show up and love the kids within his first couple of minutes on screen; character development is a dirty word in The Aristocats, here, everyone ends up exactly how they started off.

Stand by Meow

Even most of the subplots are entirely pointless, halfway through the movie the cats bump into a couple of geese called Abigail and Amelia, who take complete control of the film for a while, as their quest to find their Uncle Waldo takes centre stage. Where does this lead? NOWHERE, they get to Paris, there’s Uncle Waldo, the geese go off with him and we never see them again (except as part of the big dance party between all the characters at the end) what was the point of this? That’s a question I found myself asking a lot throughout the film as it became steadily more and more apparent that very few scenes are actually important or necessary, and that most of them serve no purpose other than to pad the film out – it’s just filler. Even worse than the geese’s is a subplot about Edgar trying to get back his umbrella and hat from the two dogs who stole them, (don’t ask) Napoleon and Lafayette, because he fears the police will catch on that he’s the cat burglar if they find them; what is the point of this? You guessed it, NOTHING, this one really takes the cake as it is of absolutely no consequence to the main story – at least those two geese spent time with the main characters, even if they didn’t really help them or add anything to the situation and then just left, at least they were part of the main action, but this is just completely meaningless. Edgar doesn’t end up getting caught because of his hat and umbrella, the dogs don’t come back to fight him or help the cats, absolutely nothing about this subplot comes back in any way, making the scenes entirely pointless. Honestly, it’s like the writers of this film knew absolutely nothing about the fundamentals of screen writing or even basic storytelling; this is not the work of seasoned veterans, these are the most basic and elementary mistakes you can make.

The only subplot that even comes close to having a purpose is the one where Roquefort the mouse and Frou-Frou the horse learn that Edgar was the one who kidnapped the cats – well, learn is probably too generous, considering Edgar just tells them – and then Roquefort goes on a quest to find the cats. Roquefort does eventually end up helping the cats by getting O’Malley and his friends to help out, but that’s just because Duchess asks him to, it has nothing to do with his previous storyline – he doesn’t find the cats, he doesn’t do anything to hinder Edgar, there’s even one scene where he stows away on the back of Edgar’s motorbike in an attempt to follow him to the cats... but then he just falls off. Why put him on the motorbike in the first place if he’s not going to do anything!? It’s mind-boggling how poorly written this film is, there are so many scenes and character stories that just go absolutely nowhere, it’s just nothing but filler. I’m not asking for Hamlet, but my God, SOMETHING would be nice, the film just has no purpose whatsoever. This film is entirely lacking in not only direction, but meaningful conflict; oh sure, there’s conflict, but it’s always resolved almost immediately and then the characters go back to dicking around and doing nothing important, where is the threat? Where is the driving force for the story? For that matter, where is the story to begin with? The pacing is equally bad, things take way too long to get started and then, when the plot is finally in motion, things go absolutely nowhere and the film continually passes the baton to other characters who have little to no bearing on the situation whatsoever; to call this film a mess would be a compliment, it’s a complete disaster.

Pretty much how I ended up after this movie finished

The characters are as flat and tasteless as communion wafers, there is just nothing to them – at best they’re completely defined by a singular, one-dimensional stereotype, at worst they just seem to have no personality at all. The only characters that come close to being any good are Duchess and O’Malley, Duchess is very well voice acted by Eva Gabor who is energetic and spirited in her delivery and really brings life to the character, which is matched well by some nice, subtle touches in Duchess’ animation. Phil Harris tries his best with O’Malley and manages some good moments, but he is just not given enough to work with; O’Malley is such a lazy attempt at recreating the charm of Tramp and Baloo that he ends up with no real personality of his own, his traits are just on loan from his predecessors, to the point that they even slap Baloo’s voice on him, hoping that things will work themselves out. That sums up a lot of this movie really, just throwing stuff together and hoping things will work themselves out, but unfortunately for Disney, nothing really does. 

All the other characters are awful, not just boring, but legitimately really bad: okay, the kittens aren’t nearly as annoying as kid characters can be, but they’re still a pain and I’m sorry but these kids, the little girl in particular, just cannot act, they are very difficult to listen to. Frou-Frou barely does anything at all and Roquefort is just annoying, he won’t stop yammering on and has no interesting quirks; Scat Cat and his crew don’t really get much time, except for Scat Cat himself who is okay I suppose, but all we get from the rest of his group is one or two lines which sum up which ethnic stereotype they represent. While most of them aren’t really too bad, the Chinese cat is really quite offensive – it always seems to be the Chinese in Disney movies, huh? – Honestly, I know racial inequality was hardly stamped out in 1970, but I really think it’s too late to vindicate the kind of stuff going on with this character: huge buck teeth, slanty eyes, broken English, saying l’s as r’s, playing the piano with chopsticks and singing about fortune cookies, it’s really unacceptable, even for the time and is probably one of, if not the worst racial stereotype in a Disney animated feature. I hate Abigail and Amelia, they are so obnoxious, they just won’t stop talking or cackling like idiots, they are incredibly frustrating to watch and listen to; similarly annoying are Napoleon and Lafayette who yammer on in a grating southern twang and constantly play out the same tired comic routine like a couple of Abbott and Costello wannabes. Seriously, they have this stupid bit where Napoleon says he hears something really complex, then Lafayette will say it’s just something simple, Napoleon insists that he’s the leader and therefore decides what they’re hearing, before conceding that it is indeed what Lafayette heard. Disney evidently thought this was hilarious, as they use it FOUR times over the course of the movie, this quickly becomes insufferable, as it wasn’t even funny the first time; inexplicably, this is the note that they choose to end the movie on, because the bit was just SOOOO funny, that they had to cram another one in before the ending, it’s just insane how blind they seem to be as to what works and what doesn’t, as they fill the entire movie with the things that don’t work and leave the very few things that do by the wayside.

Playing Chopsticks with chopsticks

The villain, Edgar, is just the worst, if you can even call him a villain, he is pathetic; not threatening, not charming, not cool, not interesting, not funny, not enjoyable, simply not good on any conceivable level, not in this world, or in any other world, galaxy, universe or parallel dimension. He’s not even really evil, he’s just kind of a jerk, but not in an interesting or understated way either, he’s just a frustrated guy and, to be honest, with good reason; his boss - who he has seemingly served loyally for many years, putting up with her weird obsession with her cats and her refusal to discipline them or stop them from walking all over his face while he’s trying to steer a carriage - decides to bequeath all her living possessions to her cats before him. Edgar is pretty justified in thinking this is unfair and INCREDIBLY STUPID, cats do not need money, jewels or a mansion, it makes no sense; of course kidnapping the cats is still reprehensible, but with this in mind, you almost forgive Edgar for doing it, he’s not a dick about it or anything and continually refuses to kill the cats even though it would clearly make his life easier, is he really supposed to be a villain? Yet, he’s not really likeable either because, like the rest of the characters, he is annoying and tiresome, constantly tumbling around, stumbling over his words, getting involved in goofy slapstick with animals and just generally failing to entertain. It’s like watching a clown at the circus, it’s not funny it’s just embarrassing – hit yourself in the face with a pie or trip over your own shoelaces if you want, but I’m not going to laugh, I’m just going to feel sorry for you, it’s pathetic.

There are only three songs in the film, not including “The Aristocats” which plays during the opening titles and to be honest, is decent. As for the songs in the film proper, “Thomas O’Malley Cat” is lame and fundamentally stupid, who just walks around singing their name? Is this supposed to be charming, or funny? Is it supposed to give us an insight into O’Malley’s character? I don’t get it, it’s just bad and really awkward. “Scales and Arpeggios” is crappy and, I’m sorry to pick on the child actors again, but the girl who plays the female kitten, Marie, just cannot sing; the only good song and, really, the only thing anyone ever really remembers about this movie is “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat” which wasn’t quite as good as I remember it, but at that point I was so sick of the film I might have been in too bad a mood to really enjoy it, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a good, jazzy song, it’s very catchy and it has some fun, if not very clever, lyrics; it is undoubtedly the best part of the movie and one of the few scenes that doesn’t bore you to death, even though, like most of the others, it still has nothing to do with the story.

‘Now what do you say we go eat some spaghetti?’

The Aristocats is an embarrassingly hollow film, one without any sense of life, purpose, fun or creativity; it starts nowhere and goes nowhere, has nothing to say and brings nothing new to the table. It’s a movie comprised almost entirely of filler, a huge amount of the scenes don't service the story or progress the plot in any way, but are simply transparent attempts to pad out a movie which is based around a fundamentally weak idea. Clearly, Disney just had nothing to work with here, they should have just acknowledged that and either retooled the idea or scrapped it entirely and started from scratch, instead they lazily try to surround it with an array of subplots that go nowhere and loud, but empty characters, like covering up a crack in a wall with an ugly painting. Unlike Cinderella, I do feel a little bad attacking The Aristocats so fiercely, as it’s mostly harmless, it’s kind of like picking on the disabled kid at school, it’s just sad; nevertheless, it’s really impossible to ignore the fact that this is just a bad movie and a dreadful bore.



Other Thoughts:

• At least it has the decency to tell you when it’s finally over

Sweet release

3/10

Next Week: Robin Hood!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com

Twitter: @JSChilds

19. The Jungle Book (1967)

Next up is The Jungle Book, a spirited romp through the jungle with a cast of classically wild and crazy Disney characters. Released in 1967, this film definitely has the feel of its time – it’s dominated by jazz music and hip, “groovy” character types from the culture of the 60’s and late 50’s, this film definitely exists in a very clear time and place. That’s not to say the film is dated however, but is rather one of its strengths; by combining the seemingly polar opposite worlds of the swinging 60’s, with its revolutionary new cultural changes and rebellious attitudes and the Indian jungle of the 18^th century, an uptight and jingoistic age of British imperialism, the movie develops a very strange and interesting setting – one that, honestly, is probably as far away from Rudyard Kipling’s original stories as you could imagine. Along with an interesting cast of characters and a straightforward and direct storyline, The Jungle Book makes for not only an interesting piece of 60’s culture, but a very enjoyable film in its own right.

Once again, there’s not much new to say the animation, which continues to utilise the xerography method first seen in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Again, things have been cleaned up a bit and the lines are less rough and sketchy, but I’m not sure how much of a good thing that is; while the animation of One Hundred and One Dalmatians was undoubtedly very rough, there was a charm and freshness to how different and almost primitive it looked, which fit well with the style of the film. In The Jungle Book, that novelty has worn off a little and some of the more traditionally rounded character designs of Mowgli and the little girl from the end of the film don’t suit this style as much as the heavily stylised and angular characters of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Still, there’s nothing else much wrong with it and there are some really nice character designs for the animal characters, who are very expressive and great at conveying emotion through facial expressions. The backgrounds are very nice, the jungle is certainly painted quite well and there is a lot of detail, adding greatly to the film’s atmosphere and effectively establishing a solid setting; if anything, the backgrounds are perhaps a little too detailed for the more comparatively simplistic and rough animation style – the two don’t gel together as well as in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which had equally stylised and simplistic backgrounds, rather than these traditionally painted ones you might see in Fantasia. Still, it seems silly to complain about the backgrounds being too nice and they definitely stay as the background, never becoming too distracting, they always serve their inherent purpose of being an environment for the characters to explore and that’s it. The animation continues to only make baby steps forward, but it still manages to capture a lot of fun and energy and be fun enough to watch.

Kaa creepin’

The story is clear, if a little thin; again, it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the original stories, even less so than usual from Disney – infamously, Walt Disney gave the head writer a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s original The Jungle Book novel and immediately told him ‘The first thing I want you to do is not to read it’ and that definitely shows, but it’s not a bad thing, as Disney manages to take the basic idea of Kipling’s world and cast and put their own, fun spin on things, as they so often do. The storyline isn’t exactly strong, nor does it really build from scene to scene; like Alice in Wonderland, it’s more about the setting than it is about any specific plot and it uses its setting to jump from scene to scene of Mowgli interacting with a different, eccentric animal character and though certainly a lot more subdued than Alice in Wonderland, the film definitely reflects that basic structure. Still, like Alice’s quest to find the white rabbit, the movie has a clear aim from day one: Bagheera wants to get Mowgli to the man village, while Mowgli wants to stay in the jungle and they must avoid Shere Khan along the way; while this is brushed aside at times to accommodate the different animal’s antics, it is never really forgotten, unlike Alice’s search for the white rabbit and remains the driving force for the movie all throughout. The plot isn’t complex or well developed and certainly takes a back seat to the characters and various set pieces, but it’s at least well defined and always present, if a little underplayed. Most of the set pieces are really fun too, one of the best being the escape from the ancient ruins – Mowgli is thrown back and forth between Baloo, Bagheera, King Louie and his monkeys, as the ruins slowly crumble around them; things are constantly jumping all over the place, making for a crazy, action-packed and exciting chase. This is just one of the great scenes from the film. 

Like The Sword in the Stone before it, The Jungle Book is really well paced; it gets started very fast and then moves the plot along quickly, without ever rushing or omitting important details. The film really does a lot in a small amount of time, by the time Mowgli has been kidnapped by the monkeys Baloo and him have only known each other for about ten minutes, yet Baloo is already furious at the monkeys and desperate to get Mowgli back and we totally believe it. In just a couple of scenes, Disney build such a strong relationship between the two that we feel like they have known each other for way longer, nothing about Baloo’s feelings for Mowgli comes off as phony or unearned, even though the two have barely spent any time together at all; Disney really packed as much as they could into every minute of the film, without making it seem bloated or messy. Things do slow down a little in the middle and the film could probably stand to be about ten minutes shorter, but it makes sense considering where the story is at that point and things do pick up again quickly and lead into an exciting climax, so this brief lull can be forgiven. As well as a sense of time, the film does a great job of creating a sense of place and a very strong and realised world in, again, such a short amount of time. You really feel like this jungle is a real, living, breathing place with its own sense of history; you get a good idea of how its society functions, how all the animals know one another, what their relationships are and what their history with one another is. All this is achieved so effectively just through the use of a few lines and brief touches in the characters’ interactions – the animal characters could all be meeting for the first time and the film would be pretty much the same, but by adding this subtle, downplayed sense of familiarity between them, it really helps legitimatise the idea that this jungle is a real place that existed before Mowgli and the audience entered it and this adds so much to the setting and atmosphere of the film. I left the film so enamoured with the world of the jungle that I honestly wanted to see more of it, I wanted know more about the animals’ pasts and how they first came to know each other... but then I remembered the short lived Disney channel show Jungle Cubs and decided maybe that some things are best left unknown.

Why is Shere Khan their friend it makes NO SENSE

The film employs a colourful cast of characters that includes arguably some of the most memorable and beloved in the entire Disney canon; understandable, as most them are great fun to watch, though some are admittedly a little weak. Mowgli is probably the weakest, as the protagonist of Disney movies so often are, as he’s mostly just a wide-eyed innocent who exists as an audience surrogate that pays witness to all the wacky animal hijinks, he doesn’t do much himself. To be fair, Mowgli is at least not a pushover like so many of his predecessors, he stands up for himself, he wants what he wants and does his best to get it and at times he can be very bold and firm, even to the point of arrogance; however, he can’t really back this up, being rather weak and ineffectual and in constant need of rescue - in the aforementioned chase through the ancient ruins, he is literally just passed from character to character and does nothing to help his own situation, he is pretty much just a prop - but at least he has the right attitude. Colonel Hathi is a bit of a bore, he’s a very generic character type of the stuffy old man who thinks he’s in the army, takes his self-appointed leadership role too seriously and isn’t really very good at what he does; he’s pretty identical to the similarly named Colonel from One Hundred and One Dalmatians and isn’t that fun, but he’s not in the film much so it’s not too bad. Then there are the vultures which are supposed to be the Beatles...? I dunno, one has the mop top haircut and sounds like someone doing a Ringo impression, but the others don’t really seem like the Beatles at all, I don’t really get it; they’re okay, I guess.

The other characters are mostly good though, Kaa is laughably pathetic and ineffectual and delivers some good physical comedy, King Louie is wild, eccentric and great fun, Bagheera is good in his constant attempts to be responsible and give good advice to Mowgli, only to be defied and then almost immediately proven right. Best of all is Baloo, he’s cool, fun, relaxed and delivers some of the best lines of the movie, such as his protestation against bringing Mowgli to the man village: ‘They’ll ruin him! They’ll make a man out of him!’ Baloo and Bagheera have a great dynamic acting as Mowgli’s two father figures and playing off one another, from the more serious, irritable and long-suffering Bagheera, who seems to get all the bad luck, to the more fun-loving, irresponsible and mellow Baloo, who seems to glide through life and get by with few troubles. They make a really good, classic double-act that unfortunately can get a little pushed aside at times for the other animal characters, which is a shame because their relationship is so strong that it really should be at the centre of the movie.

Then of course, there’s the villain, Shere Khan, one of the best parts of the movie; though only appearing in the last third, Shere Khan’s presence is felt all through the first hour of the movie and when he finally makes his appearance he proceeds to totally steal the show. He has such a fantastic personality, from his lazy, disinterested design, to the slow and deliberate movements in his animation and the way he talks – he is almost Shakespearean in his cadence, always speaking slowly and carefully, politely, but with a layer of threat, he is in complete control of every scene he’s in. While generally polite and reasonable, when this calm geniality is offset with his ruthless pragmatism, it makes Shere Khan seem genuinely threatening and dangerous, rather than just silly like Captain Hook or laughably evil like Maleficent or the Evil Queen. Shere Khan is very fun to watch, but he’s not a joke, he’s also a legitimately dangerous villain with a goal that is not ridiculously petty or cartoonishly evil, but frighteningly cruel and realistic – he’s not a monster and is mostly pretty easygoing, but he’ll remove anything that’s a threat to him, even a child.

‘Look on my works ye Mighty and despair’ – King Louie

Though the film has a strong setting and a good cast of characters, it is the music which is really at the heart of the picture; the songs of The Jungle Book are almost all good and, along with the musical score, they solidify the atmosphere the film is trying to create and bring the whole thing together. The background music is always fantastic, the overture and main theme of the movie is a beautiful, mysterious piece that effortlessly captures the dark beauty, mystery and danger of the jungle; the sounds of the bass flute (I believe that’s what it is, but perhaps it’s a different woodwind instrument) in particular evoke a sense of exoticism that fits India and its environment so perfectly, it’s almost like an audible representation of a snake, slowly slithering through the jungle under moonlight. It really is just a wonderful, wonderful piece of music from composer George Bruns. Then there’s the songs, though they’re not all fantastic, even some of the weaker ones like the chirpy “Colonel Hathi’s March” or rather slow “Trust in Me” are still very good and the other few are really top notch. The music to “My Own Home” is heard throughout the film whenever the characters discuss the fact that Mowgli is, no matter how long he’s spent in the jungle, still a human, foreshadowing the importance the song will have in his discovery and acceptance of this fact he has resisted for so long; when the song finally plays in full, it has so much more impact. The song itself is, like the main theme, haunting and mysterious, with a dark sense of beauty; it’s like a siren song that slowly draws the listener in, perfectly capturing Mowgli’s feelings – his sense of curiosity, the mystery of the young girl and the unexplainable pull she has on him which finally brings him to accept his role as a man. 

To speak on a less pretentious level, “I Wan’na Be Like You” is just an awesome jazz song; high energy, upbeat, insanely catchy and while a little lacking in lyrics – most of it is just Louie and Baloo scatting – the few that are in there are mostly really good, the powerful imagery of fire as ‘man’s red flower’ in particular, stands out. Though a little slower, but just as catchy, “The Bare Necessities” is another hit which, for quite possibly the first time since “When I See an Elephant Fly”, shows that wonderful Disney wit and playfulness in its lyricism which will be perfected over the next twenty or so years. From the basic, but joyful pun of the title to the fast paced, tongue-twister verse which jumps between ‘paw’, ‘raw’, ‘claw’ and ‘pawpaw’, you can really tell how much fun they were having with this one and the audience surely is too; how can you dislike a song which rhymes ‘necessities’ with ‘rest at ease’ IT’S JUST SO GOOD. On a side note, The Lion King really owes quite a lot to The Jungle Book, the way young Simba draws from Mowgli, Zazu from Bagheera, Timon and Puumba from Baloo, the hyenas from King Louie and the other monkeys, Scar from Shere Khan and most notably, “Hakuna Matata” from “Bare Necessities”; in fact, there’s a whole part of “Bare Necessities” (a song about being carefree, easygoing and taking whatever comes your way in life GEE SOUNDS FAMILIAR) where Baloo teaches Mowgli about eating bugs by lifting up a rock and showing him the bugs underneath GEE SOUNDS FAMILIAR. Not to say The Lion King is lazy or bad, far from it and we’ll get to that when we get to it, but it’s weird to see how often it’s praised and called one of the best and many people’s favourite, when people so rarely seem to acknowledge how heavily it drew from The Jungle Book, but whatever. Either way, the music in this film is really good.

Junglebait

The Jungle Book is a great time, it’s hip, it’s fun and it always keeps you entertained; the world of the jungle is so well realised through the interactions of the characters and the atmospheric effect of the music that it really feels like a real place – more importantly, it feels like a real place that I’d want to go to and that really says a lot for this movie’s charm. The characters range from a little boring to a lot of fun, the villain is dripping with style and charisma and is incredibly enjoyable to watch and the songs practically explode off the screen with their energetic choreography and upbeat rhythm. Unfortunately, while a few weaker characters might not usually be a big problem, they do become a bit of a wrench in the works for this very character based film and, while the pacing is always good, their scenes can slow things down a bit. The plot is also a little too thin, though the film doesn’t suffer from a lack of direction, it doesn’t exactly develop the story into much else and uses it more as an excuse for tangentially related side-stories, though they’re mostly entertaining ones, so it’s not much of a problem. Artistically, the animation is at times very good and the backgrounds are nice, but the general artistry of the film is a little lacking; it’s definitely not bad, but from Disney I expect a little more. Still, these problems certainly don’t stop The Jungle Book from being a really good film and a clear source of inspiration for things to come; sadly, this was the last film in the animated canon that Walt Disney himself worked on, but all things considered, it’s a pretty  damn good one to go out on.

Other Thoughts:

• Best moment in the movie:
  
  Bagheera: ‘This will take brains, not brawn’
  Baloo: ‘You better believe it and I’m loaded with both!’
  
  Baloo is the man

Is he supposed to be in drag...?

• 10 Things You Never Knew About Disney: You guys, Shere Khan killed Bambi’s mother!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s a deer in a Disney movie, so it must be the same character!!!!!!!!!!!!

Somebody send this to Buzzfeed right now!!!!!!!!!!

• Finally, some vultures that don’t look like messengers from hell

Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my vultures

7/10

Next Week: The Aristocats!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com

Twitter: @JSChilds