MovieMonday: The Great Mouse Detective

This still-enjoyable movie from Disney was among the first to use CGI, or computer-generated imagery.

Disney began doing cartoons the hard way with Snow White, which featured laborious hand-drawn cel-by-cel movements and a multiple image camera that moved characters and backgrounds at different speeds as a story progressed.  Later cartoon productions were clunkier and produced with much less attention to detail, which showed.  By the middle of the last century, the character-driven Warner Brothers cartoons were valued, but those and Disney classics are the only ones remembered today.

Besides good animation, this comic film is a loyal, mouse-driven derivation of the Sherlock Holmes stories and books written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published between 1892 and 1927.

Its story begins in London when a toymaker is kidnapped after giving his daughter a handmade gift.  The daughter, Olivia, seeks help from a gentleman, Dr. David Q. Dawson (Watson.) She needs help  to find Basil of Baker Street (named after Basil Rathbone who played Sherlock in a the mid-20th century film series, no doubt,) to find her father.

Dawson is a kindly fellow, and together the two find Basil's mousehole under the Baker Street apartment where a gentleman upstairs (Sherlock?) plays a violin in silhouette in a window in the evening moonlight.

Basil's landlady, Mrs. Judson (Hudson in the books) welcomes Olivia in a motherly way, and Basil agrees to help find Olivia's father, who has been kidnapped by an agent of the dastardly Ratigan (Professor Moriarty.)

From there, the adventures and conflicts build and build, climaxing finally in battles over and inside London's most famous timepiece.

This film is fun to watch for children and adults.  It also is true enough to the character of Sherlock (who always has been what we would now call "on the spectrum" but whose hard shell is cracked by the distress of innocent victims) and Watson to prepare children for later literary or film versions of Conan Doyle stories.

Besides being more visually arresting, the film is anchored more in history than popular culture of the current day.  Almost 35 years after its release, Mouse Detective retains interest because it refers to old stories that don't rely on tropes like Lego/DC superheroes, Pokemon characters and twerking animals.  (Twerking was a 1980s dance phenomenon that was said to have ended in 2013, but you wouldn't know it if you watched more recent children's animation.)

If you share time with a young person who has seen this movie, by the time the person is 10, for instance, you can enjoy the Rathbone movies that date to 1939, or the still-enjoyable British Granada television series that features Jeremy Brett as Sherlock.  A young person who has enjoyed Mouse Detective many times (as children do with favorite books or videos) will appreciate instantly Sherlock's deductive reasoning, his reliance on Watson for human interaction and his absolute and unswerving focus on solving mysteries.

In short, this cartoon is nearly 35 years old but still worth enjoying.


Notes

This movie was enhanced by the participation of two film legends.

The first was the late Henry Mancini, who scored the movie and is most famous for "Moon River" the song (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) for the Breakfast at Tiffany's film (that I mean to see someday) and the "Pink Panther Theme" from the Peter Sellers movie series.
           If you have a moment, enjoy the first minute or so of this Mouse Detective scene, in which the three heroes search for clues in a factory of wind-up toys (a perfect setting for a Disney movie.) The musical accompaniment matches the action perfectly.  Mancini also contributed catchy music for Ratigan and his goon team.

The second is also-late Vincent Price, who voices the character of Ratigan, a rat, yes, who aims to replace the mouse monarch of England on the1897 occasion of the actual Queen Victoria's 50-year jubilee.
            Price died in the last century after a long film career as a master of evil.  You can almost hear him twirling his mustaches as he reads his lines with devilish glee

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Contemporary parents are getting mildly leery of this film because it includes a mouse chanteuse singing and stripping off (some) clothing in a performance at a sleazy riverfront bar, and because Dr. Dawson is made briefly silly after being served a mickey at the same locale.  So while film experts recommend the movie only for children over the age of six, some parents are upping the minimum recommended viewing age to eight.

             Difficult as it is to protect children now from all the coarsening content of our popular culture,  if parents focus their distress on a 1986 Disney cartoon in which honorable good guys help a frightened young heroine, the parents surely will have their hands full every time a child uses a computer tablet or walks outside the family home's front door. 

Movie Monday: Dumbo

This is the remake of an old Disney animated feature, a live-action version that looks great but serves up a three-course meal of stereotypes old and new.  The best parts are the winsome title elephant and Danny DeVito's energetic portrayal of Max Medici, the owner of a small-time circus.  The rest is not so good.  

The story opens in 1919, when Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) arrives home from the war, having lost everything but his children.  His left arm has been amputated, his wife has died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and his circus job as a horse-riding performer is gone because the circus is broke and the horses have been sold.

The children are 2019 kids in period clothes.  Much is made of the older child, a daughter (Nico Parker), who wants to be a scientist and acts the part, and less of her younger brother (Finley Hobbins,) who hasn't indicated a career preference yet.

Holt is given a new assignment tending the elephants.  One, pregnant Mrs. Jumbo, delivers a baby boy who turns out to have very large ears, which make him the object of jokes and ridicule.  When Mrs. Jumbo reacts to protect her son, the two are separated and she is chained in a wagon, apart from her beloved baby, who also misses his mother. 

The two children discover Dumbo's superpower -- yes, flying -- and this redounds to the benefit of the Medici circus, which attracts the attention of a more prosperous (read: greedy) circus operator named Vandevere (Michael Keaton).  He absorbs the Medici troupe and then teams with a financier, who is also greedy (duh) and is played by Alan Arkin.  They plan to fire all the Medici performers and exile Mrs. Jumbo to certain death while capitalizing on the prized asset, Dumbo, by making him the star attraction. 

If we were talking in 17th century terms, this would be the moment known as the Slough of Despond in the "The Pilgrim's Progress" -- which I'm guessing filmmaker Tim Burton did not have in mind.  But the film continues on that old story's track to the expected redemptive conclusion, one that will gratify all the animal rights protesters who have been picketing traditional circuses for the last 25 years or so.

There's nothing wrong with this exactly, but I didn't understand how all the pieces came together.  Children attending the movie will get the gist of the thing, but if they're older than 12 or so, they may suspect their emotions are being manipulated in the service of a formulaic plot. 


Notes

The first "Dumbo" was Disney's fourth full-length cartoon (after "Snow White," "Pinocchio" and "Fantasia.")  In recent years, the mouse house has been releasing various new versions of old favorites.  Another Tim Burton-led one, "Alice in Wonderland," was popular in 2010, but last year's "Mary Poppins" disappointed fans of the original.   Next up, apparently, is Will Smith as "Aladdin."

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I haven't seen the original "Dumbo" from 1941, but the general story is clear below.  It differs from the current release in that it is shorter -- 64 minutes versus 112 -- which may be why the current film has more characters and plot elements.  Also, the older version has no real human characters; Dumbo's best friend and biggest fan is a mouse.  Other animals scorn Dumbo, including a group of crows who speak in African American dialect and then become great friends with the little guy, a touch that probably was intended as a nod to racial harmony.  Unfortunately, the leader of the crows is named Jim; a bit awkward, that.  

Bambi: The Little Film That Could

Above is a very, very cute snippet from Bambi, the 1942 animated movie by Walt Disney Productions (today The Walt Disney Company.)

The film is legendary now, but its release was anything but successful.  It did not sell enough tickets to cover its cost, which was remarkable after the Snow White-Pinocchio-Fantasia-Dumbo series of Disney movies that preceded it.

There were several reasons.

     --The enemy in the movie was Man.  Man, in the form of a hunter, shot Bambi's
        mother dead.  There were more hunters generally in the country at that time,
        and that plot point made them pretty angry.

     --Bambi was released at the beginning of our involvement in World War II, and
        people were distracted.  In Europe, the only other large market for films, things
        were even worse.

     --Critics did not like the movie.  Why, oh why, they wondered, had Disney strayed
        from the fantasy film formula that had made the company great?

The filmmakers based Bambi on a long-forgotten book (that did not include the doe shooting), and they went at it in a new way -- trying to understand how animals moved and acted.  Bambi and his friends are drawn as cuter versions of real animals, and they live in an Eden-like forest.  This was worlds away from the characters and settings of earlier Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Dumbo the elephant.

After the film's flop, Disney shifted its focus to support the war effort, as many corporations did in the early 1940s.

By 1944, cash was short at Disney, and its executives hit on a new idea to top up the corporate coffers. They re-released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had been very popular in its original run in 1937.

The only expenses involved were marketing and distribution.  There were not many other non-war films in production.  A whole batch of children who had not seen the original SWATSD were now old enough to enjoy it, and families who liked the movie in the first place might return for a second go.

The strategy worked.  In retrospect, it seems to have convinced Walt Disney and his team that the core value of the company resided in its content vault.

Bambi redeemed itself with this re-release strategy.  It returned, successfully, to theaters in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982 and 1988.  Copies were released on VHS in 1989 and 1997, and then in a deluxe Blu-ray/DVD combo package in 2011.  It is one of the most popular children's films of all time.

In fact, all the classic cartoon movies got this re-rerelease rotation treatment.  Several -- Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin -- were turned into theatrical shows.  The biggest of these, Lion King, has been in continuous production on Broadway in New York since 1973.

Having sewed up the children/family movie market, Disney built theme parks featuring scenes and characters from its movies; from there, it moved into resorts and cruises.

It also keeps restocking the vault.  Disney's latest release, Jungle Book, is expected to gross at least $1 billion.  The company also has acquired creative material, including the rights to Winnie the Pooh, and content-creating companies -- Pixar (Toy Story), Marvel Entertainment (comic heroes) and Lucasfilm (Star Wars.)

And Bambi, who if he were human would have started collecting Social Security in 2007, remains a gift that keeps on giving.  The Disney marketing site features stuffed Thumper toys, Bambi spiral notebooks, children's clothes, mugs and even a $795 framed giclee print of Bambi, Thumper and Flower the skunk in the movie's idyllic forest.