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  • Locked thread
GrandpaPants
Feb 13, 2006


Free to roam the heavens in man's noble quest to investigate the weirdness of the universe!

Ballz posted:

Anime is officially dead to me. After Ghibli, I have nothing to look forward to. gently caress.

Decius posted:

Makoto Shinkai makes some really good movies/shorts in the "slice of life"-Ghibli movie style.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices felt like a darker Ghibli movie. It's been a while since I've seen it though, so maybe I am giving it too much credit, but I'd recommend checking it out too. Mamoru Hosoda is not that Ghibli, but I really liked Summer Wars and Wolf Children. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is apparently rare as hell on blu-ray, so :smith:

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K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
So, not to get in the way of the mourning over Ghibli's restructuring, but I actually had the opportunity last night to see a movie I hadn't seen since I was a kid, a little animated gem from UPA called Gay Purr-ee.



Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. It commits that cardinal sin of kids movies where the female protagonist is just kind of patronizingly foolish and is totally unsympathetic and incompetent, requiring her to be saved by her tom cat. This is the film that Chuck Jones lost his contract at Warner Bros. over, and I'm really not certain it was worth it, despite it being co-written by his wife and he.

It's all over the place as far as story structure goes, and a lot of the music is just awful, with the stand-out being "Bubbles": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQeOuZw_FTo

The highlight of the film is pretty much the production design, which is obviously very reverential of the history of French art at the turn of the century.

Macaluso
Sep 23, 2005

I HATE THAT HEDGEHOG, BROTHER!

FunkyAl posted:

Ayyyy, so now there's a trailer for the new spongebob movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3I4C7i3pi8

The 3d stuff looks p. good but I can't help but feel like the 2d stuff is just kinda...flat. Also they have bLatantLy done the "spongebob on land" thing on multiple occasions so it feels like treading old ground.

The 2D stuff does feel a little flat, especially compared to the first movie. On the other hand, it doesn't look like too much of the movie takes place under water so I imagine they just didn't want to bother putting as much effort into the hand drawn stuff.

The CG stuff looks great though. It looks absolutely goofy and silly so I'm interested in seeing it for all the ridiculous looking super hero stuff. It doesn't look bad. I feel like this movie is a bit late though. I haven't watched Spongebob in years at this point. The show kind of peaked at the first movie, and it seemed to go downhill after. The marching band episode to this day is still one of the funniest episodes of any TV show I've ever watched.

Squarely Circle
Jul 28, 2010

things worsen and worsen

K. Waste posted:

So, not to get in the way of the mourning over Ghibli's restructuring, but I actually had the opportunity last night to see a movie I hadn't seen since I was a kid, a little animated gem from UPA called Gay Purr-ee.



Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. It commits that cardinal sin of kids movies where the female protagonist is just kind of patronizingly foolish and is totally unsympathetic and incompetent, requiring her to be saved by her tom cat. This is the film that Chuck Jones lost his contract at Warner Bros. over, and I'm really not certain it was worth it, despite it being co-written by his wife and he.

It's all over the place as far as story structure goes, and a lot of the music is just awful, with the stand-out being "Bubbles": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQeOuZw_FTo

The highlight of the film is pretty much the production design, which is obviously very reverential of the history of French art at the turn of the century.

Wow, I haven't seen that since I was a kid either. I only saw it once and never heard anybody else really talk about it or mention it ever, I was beginning to wonder if I'd imagined the entire thing :psyduck:

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Macaluso posted:

The 2D stuff does feel a little flat, especially compared to the first movie. On the other hand, it doesn't look like too much of the movie takes place under water so I imagine they just didn't want to bother putting as much effort into the hand drawn stuff.

The CG stuff looks great though. It looks absolutely goofy and silly so I'm interested in seeing it for all the ridiculous looking super hero stuff. It doesn't look bad. I feel like this movie is a bit late though. I haven't watched Spongebob in years at this point. The show kind of peaked at the first movie, and it seemed to go downhill after. The marching band episode to this day is still one of the funniest episodes of any TV show I've ever watched.

A major problem for casual viewers is that they didn't make that many episodes. There are 10 seasons for 15 years, and most of those are 20 half hour episodes (40 segments) each. It makes Nick tons of cash though and 5 year olds usually don't care so whatever.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Squarely Circle posted:

Wow, I haven't seen that since I was a kid either. I only saw it once and never heard anybody else really talk about it or mention it ever, I was beginning to wonder if I'd imagined the entire thing :psyduck:

Lol, I've had that experience with at least three different animated films: Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Rock-a-Doodle, and Once Upon a Forest.

I'm still not convinced Rock-a-Doodle exists, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

mareep
Dec 26, 2009

Macaluso posted:

The 2D stuff does feel a little flat, especially compared to the first movie. On the other hand, it doesn't look like too much of the movie takes place under water so I imagine they just didn't want to bother putting as much effort into the hand drawn stuff.

The CG stuff looks great though. It looks absolutely goofy and silly so I'm interested in seeing it for all the ridiculous looking super hero stuff. It doesn't look bad. I feel like this movie is a bit late though. I haven't watched Spongebob in years at this point. The show kind of peaked at the first movie, and it seemed to go downhill after. The marching band episode to this day is still one of the funniest episodes of any TV show I've ever watched.

I'm kind of excited because the first movie was supposed to capstone the series and the creator bailed after that, so the show became absolutely unwatchable, but he (Stephen Hillenburg) came back for this. I'm not expecting to get blown away or anything but the first movie just did whatever the hell it wanted and it was really funny to me so if this is basically the same I'll be happy.

Macaluso
Sep 23, 2005

I HATE THAT HEDGEHOG, BROTHER!

redcheval posted:

but he (Stephen Hillenburg) came back for this.

I actually didn't know that. That makes me more excited for the movie then!

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

K. Waste posted:

Lol, I've had that experience with at least three different animated films: Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Rock-a-Doodle, and Once Upon a Forest.

I'm still not convinced Rock-a-Doodle exists, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

That last one had some really weird imagery, but now I'm hankering to watch all of them (even though they're at best troubled productions but I enjoyed We're Back! so maybe I just have lower standards).

dirksteadfast
Oct 10, 2010

K. Waste posted:

I'm still not convinced Rock-a-Doodle exists, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Rock-a-Doodle feels like such a fever dream I'm surprised it hasn't been written off as a mass hallucination. It would have been nice to see Disney's take on the story as was originally planned.

Also it's sad to hear about Ghibli, even if it's just restructuring. I'm afraid the studio will more or less fade away rather than go out on a high note, though the optimist in me hopes for some unknown with a clear vision stepping up and surprising us all. Does anyone have any recommendations on studios that still seriously explore animation as an art form? I mean, Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks all put out quality work still, but it's been so long since I felt anyone produce anything of note in terms of the physical medium itself. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is LAIKA, and that's almost because they're just playing a different sport altogether.

Samuel Clemens
Oct 4, 2013

I think we should call the Avengers.

Sylvain Chomet is the first name that comes to mind, although I don't know if he's currently working on any projects.

Pick
Jul 19, 2009
Nap Ghost

computer parts posted:

That last one had some really weird imagery, but now I'm hankering to watch all of them (even though they're at best troubled productions but I enjoyed We're Back! so maybe I just have lower standards).

Screweyes was a neat notion for a villain, but ultimately it's a poor film.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

I really like the circus of dread and creepiness, but yeah We're Back! is just kind of a mess - some cool elements thrown in together without any coherency so it ends up doing it all a disservice

Macaluso
Sep 23, 2005

I HATE THAT HEDGEHOG, BROTHER!
Man whatever. We're Back! is awesome and the song is awesome. Both times. :colbert:

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
Yeah, I haven't watched We're Back in years, but it was a pretty regular staple of my younger years. It had two things I loved: dinosaurs and cartoons.

But any animation that Steven Spielberg or Don Bluth touched as a producer/bankroller seems to be pretty much poo poo, though.

During production of my thesis our crew randomly decided to watch An American Tail on an LSD trip, and while we went along with it to the end, it only took "There Are No Cats In America" to make us realize just what tremendous poo poo this holy grail of our childhoods really was. It's one of those songs where it tries to incorporate all these different elements reminiscent of the new immigrant experience, but every time the chorus breaks in, it's just hammering into your head how obnoxious the entire film is in execution. It even became an in-joke for the rest of the shoot that whenever there was, like, a dead zone between setting up shots somebody would start singing "But there are NO-O-O-O cats in America" and make everyone cringe in psychological pain. Everything that is wrong with a Don Bluth movie can be summarized just by watching that sequence.

Al-Saqr
Nov 11, 2007

One Day I Will Return To Your Side.

K. Waste posted:

Yeah, I haven't watched We're Back in years, but it was a pretty regular staple of my younger years. It had two things I loved: dinosaurs and cartoons.

But any animation that Steven Spielberg or Don Bluth touched as a producer/bankroller seems to be pretty much poo poo, though.

During production of my thesis our crew randomly decided to watch An American Tail on an LSD trip, and while we went along with it to the end, it only took "There Are No Cats In America" to make us realize just what tremendous poo poo this holy grail of our childhoods really was. It's one of those songs where it tries to incorporate all these different elements reminiscent of the new immigrant experience, but every time the chorus breaks in, it's just hammering into your head how obnoxious the entire film is in execution. It even became an in-joke for the rest of the shoot that whenever there was, like, a dead zone between setting up shots somebody would start singing "But there are NO-O-O-O cats in America" and make everyone cringe in psychological pain. Everything that is wrong with a Don Bluth movie can be summarized just by watching that sequence.

Go gently caress yourself, 'An American Tale' is a goddamn animation classic and I wont hear your whinging about how one song (a catchy song at that) ruins a movie that by all measures and means is fantastically drawn, animated and tells its story really well.

I'll fight you right here and right now and declare that 'An American Tale' is the second best Don Bluth movie right after NIMH, not only does it have one of the most tear-inducing songs in children films history, alot of the songs it has in it are super catchy as all hell. it has a ton of fantastically shot scenes and awe-inpiring animation (the loving rat robot and the rotating view of the statue of liberty), it has a ton of things going for it art wise, music wise, and animation wise. and I'm sooooory if you were too hopped up on LSD to pay attention.

Al-Saqr fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Aug 5, 2014

Macaluso
Sep 23, 2005

I HATE THAT HEDGEHOG, BROTHER!
Man, I like American Tail, but it's not anywhere near THAT good. The animation is... fine, but it has the weird Don Bluth issues that plague all of his stuff. And if the "one of the most tear-inducing songs in children films history" song is Somewhere Out There, then I suppose the tear-inducing part is the high pitched screeching the main character does trying to hit the high notes.

DNS
Mar 11, 2009

by Smythe

Al-Saqr posted:

Go gently caress yourself, 'An American Tale' is a goddamn animation classic and I wont hear your whinging about how one song (a catchy song at that) ruins a movie that by all measures and means is fantastically drawn, animated and tells its story really well.

I'll fight you right here and right now and declare that 'An American Tale' is the second best Don Bluth movie right after NIMH, not only does it have one of the most tear-inducing songs in children films history, alot of the songs it has in it are super catchy as all hell. it has a ton of fantastically shot scenes and awe-inpiring animation (the loving rat robot and the rotating view of the statue of liberty), it has a ton of things going for it art wise, music wise, and animation wise. and I'm sooooory if you were too hopped up on LSD to pay attention.

Oh wow, second best Don Blut movie? High priase...

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

The rat bot was pretty cool, and the animation is pretty unassailable. But "Somewhere Out There" is also a pretty obnoxious song. It's not as bad as "There Are No Cats In America" or "A Duo," but it's one more nail in the coffin of a film that is billed entirely on its sentimentality and animation and not on any particular merit in regards to its characters or plot, which are rudimentary at best.

Instead of a story about the new immigrant experience - about characters who, forced to leave their world behind because of poverty and persecution, work hard to carve out a niche in a New World, accepting that "lights don't grow on Christmas trees" and that hardships are a fact of life - Bluth soft-serves his child audience a bad fairytale in which there are virtually no demands placed on Fievel other than to be meek and naive and to rely upon the spontaneous compassion of others. He hatches the plan to escape the sweat shop, but it's only Tony who keeps him alive long enough for this to be of value. He doesn't have to actively find Bridget after the maulers break up the political rally; Tony and Bridget just fall in love magically and this gets him to where he wants to be without him having to do anything. He hatches the plan to get rid of the cats, but he doesn't do anything to recommend himself to Gussie other than being a cute little kid, and further demonstrates that he has no practical skills that he can apply when the poo poo goes down, because he doesn't need to, because the plot is just magically ferrying him inevitably towards succeeding. He escapes the maulers, but he does this only because he meets the one not-racist cat who spontaneously decides that the two are a duo despite them having no history and Fievel not actively demonstrating that he's willing to cross the 'racial' divide for the greater good of both mice and cats.

In the meantime, Bluth does his typical thing of making 'dark' or 'scary' sequences that don't actually have any direct consequences upon the main characters and are, thus, pointed up as hollow attempts to inject drama into a story where nobody actually has to do anything to survive. Fievel doesn't even inherit any of the traces of his father's culture - he's not particularly spiritual, he's not a musician, the implication is that if his parents did die, his family legacy would die out with it. So of course they have to survive because the film makes it evident that Fievel isn't a character, but a cutesy, one-dimensional projection for the modern day child who still doesn't come any closer to comprehending what it was like to be an immigrant child at the turn of the 20th century despite the overt and simplistic allusions to the new immigrant experience. In this regard, all the other characters are equally naive, borderline racist stereotypes who exist to magically solve the problems of the world for him so that he can 'find his parents,' rather than to radically reject the supremacy of the cats. In this regard, it's not even a particularly good fairy tale, because the hero of a fairy tale actually has to do something and make some sort of sacrifice.

The only thing good that came out of its production was that it spurred Art Spiegelman to try to publish the first collected volume of Maus before it could be overshadowed by another lovely, unoriginal animated musical that fails in even the most basic regard of "having music that doesn't make me want to stab my eardrums" that only receives special regard because it's so shameless in pandering to a sanitized version of American history.

Spatula City
Oct 21, 2010

LET ME EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING
I think I only saw An American Tail once, a looooong time ago, but I had the sequel on VHS and loving loved it, watched it several times a year until I was a teenager. Does it hold up at all?

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Other then the rather questionable bit involving the Native mice, I actually find Fievel goes West more entertaining then the original. 'Dreams to Dreams' and 'The Girl You Left Behind' are fantastic songs.

Pick
Jul 19, 2009
Nap Ghost
"Dreams to Dream" is a great song.

Shindragon
Jun 6, 2011

by Athanatos
Fievel goes to West is actually one of the decent non Bluth sequels surprisingly.

sbagliom
Mar 27, 2010

SOCIALISM IS DEAD

Pick posted:

"Dreams to Dream" is a great song.

Here, let me ruin it for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5vt6a2khbw

YggiDee
Sep 12, 2007

WASP CREW

K. Waste posted:

So, not to get in the way of the mourning over Ghibli's restructuring, but I actually had the opportunity last night to see a movie I hadn't seen since I was a kid, a little animated gem from UPA called Gay Purr-ee.



Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered

I remember that movie from when I was a kid too! And yeah, Bubbles is crap. But I can't really hate it, because there was also stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUoyjx3G17M
I may well be biased because it was my first introduction to post Wizard of Oz Judy Garland, but drat that woman had pipes.

(Sorry, I'm on mobile, can't seem to work the video tags right)

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

YggiDee posted:

I remember that movie from when I was a kid too! And yeah, Bubbles is crap. But I can't really hate it, because there was also stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUoyjx3G17M
I may well be biased because it was my first introduction to post Wizard of Oz Judy Garland, but drat that woman had pipes.

(Sorry, I'm on mobile, can't seem to work the video tags right)

I actually thought "Bubbles" was the best song. That's another good one. The only other one of note is probably "The Money Cat." The animation of Meowrice's (ugh) underlings is one of the best aspects of the production.

Squarely Circle
Jul 28, 2010

things worsen and worsen
Fievel Goes West is great. Silly, but great. And quite pretty to look at. I really love the style Amblin used for it and other films like Balto and We're Back (even if the latter goes horribly off-model sometimes), can't quite put my finger on what it is but they're so nice to see in motion.

I can confirm that all three of those obscure movies exist, got 'em all on VHS from when I was little. My favorite thing about We're Back is that it is technically a Thanksgiving movie :downs: And apparently it was based off a book, which I feel compelled to track down and read because what the gently caress.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Macaluso posted:

Man, I like American Tail, but it's not anywhere near THAT good. The animation is... fine, but it has the weird Don Bluth issues that plague all of his stuff. And if the "one of the most tear-inducing songs in children films history" song is Somewhere Out There, then I suppose the tear-inducing part is the high pitched screeching the main character does trying to hit the high notes.

The cover of "Somewhere Out There" from that one episode of Community is way loving better than any actual musical number in a Don Bluth film.

Das Boo
Jun 9, 2011

There was a GHOST here.
It's gone now.

redcheval posted:

I'm kind of excited because the first movie was supposed to capstone the series and the creator bailed after that, so the show became absolutely unwatchable, but he (Stephen Hillenburg) came back for this. I'm not expecting to get blown away or anything but the first movie just did whatever the hell it wanted and it was really funny to me so if this is basically the same I'll be happy.

So what you're saying is, you missed Handsome Squidward. :colbert:

e: Also, my hatred of Anastasia can only be matched for my love of Once Upon A December.

Das Boo fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Aug 6, 2014

Tartarus Sauce
Jan 16, 2006


friendship is magic
in a pony paradise
don't you judge me

Robindaybird posted:

I really like the circus of dread and creepiness, but yeah We're Back! is just kind of a mess - some cool elements thrown in together without any coherency so it ends up doing it all a disservice

It has some really fun, creative elements, and the BEST AND MOST HOLY poo poo TRAUMATIC VILLAIN DEATH EVER. But, plot-wise and pacing-wise, it is indeed a mess.

Corek
May 11, 2013

by R. Guyovich

DoctorWhat posted:

The cover of "Somewhere Out There" from that one episode of Community is way loving better than any actual musical number in a Don Bluth film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZDNUqMeXVw

Babe Magnet
Jun 2, 2008

Dragon's Lair is the second best Bluth movie, actually.

Sir Lemming
Jan 27, 2009

It's a piece of JUNK!
American Tail is a cool movie about a mouse getting lost in a scary and unfamiliar place and then reuniting with his family.

If it were made 20 years later, Pixar probably would've found a way to also make it say something significant and relevant about immigration, but I still think it's pretty good.

raditts
Feb 21, 2001

The Kwanzaa Bot is here to protect me.


Babe Magnet posted:

Dragon's Lair is the second best Bluth movie, actually.

Dragon's Lair II being the best, of course.

Fishylungs
Jan 12, 2008
I love John Cleese as the villain in Fievel Goes West, hell I think the whole cast was great!

Spatula City posted:

I think I only saw An American Tail once, a looooong time ago, but I had the sequel on VHS and loving loved it, watched it several times a year until I was a teenager. Does it hold up at all?

I'm glad it wasn't just me then! I loved that movie, and I'd sometimes watch it twice a day. The only movie I've watched more is Jurassic Park.

After "Tell me lies" from Cats Don't Dance, "Girl you left behind" is one of my most favorite songs from an animated movie.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

"Girl you left behind" is a definitely a song I can see being in an old-style western

Senior Scarybagels
Jan 6, 2011

nom nom
Grimey Drawer
I am glad that I am not the only one with fond memories of Fieval Goes West.

Kikka
Feb 10, 2010

I POST STUPID STUFF ABOUT DOCTOR WHO
Talking about Bluth, I'm watching Troll in Central Park because I watched it a couple of times as a kid.
Holy poo poo what garbage. This is where Don Bluth thought he doesn't need to make characters move well, he can just make them jiggle, roll and twitch. Also look at this loving character sheet:



Even the slightest movement is causing a lot of distortion; the characters looking like rubber is one of the reasons I dislike Bluth's style of animation, but here you can see it was really bad in his later movies.

Also lol @ the face in the middle

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Sir Lemming posted:

American Tail is a cool movie about a mouse getting lost in a scary and unfamiliar place and then reuniting with his family.

If it were made 20 years later, Pixar probably would've found a way to also make it say something significant and relevant about immigration, but I still think it's pretty good.

I don't know that it would have made a single lick of difference considering that the film's primary problem isn't that it doesn't "say something significant and relevant about immigration," that nostalgia for a sanitized view of history and childhood hasn't changed in 20 years, and that Pixar's model is also highly attuned to sentimentality. The main difference is that when Pixar does sanitized, sentimental nostalgia - Toy Story 2, Cars - they also at least try to make it a point of having the characters do something besides being cute cartoons, that the antagonists provide a significant challenge to the protagonist in achieving their goals and demanding that the protagonist be able to work it out, and also that the 'donor' supporting cast have clearly defined motivations of their own that the protagonist also needs to work with or manipulate rather than just assuming that they'll help because it's the 'right thing to do.'

A great film to compare/contrast An American Tail is actually the Walt Disney adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1951). You'll notice that in An American Tail there's an overt reference to that story by having Fievel arrive at Liberty Island in a glass bottle, the Western Ocean taking the place of Alice's Pool of Tears.



Now, Disney's film frequently gets lambasted for 'Americanizing' and making a sentimental morality story out of Carroll's books, but it actually does a pretty good job of amalgamating aspects and characters from both books into a plot structure that's not only coherent, but plays off the kind of absurd logic that the studio usually reserved for its shorts. With its violence, terror, and innuendo, the movie has a veritable Tex Avery feel that actually works perfectly with the source material. (The tune of "Clean cup, clean cup, move down" is actually a variation on "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down," a reference to the theme tune of Warner Bros. cartoons.)

The first and most significant change that the Disney film makes is actually one which makes Alice slightly more sympathetic and self-conscious, consistent with taking many of the jokes that Carroll makes at Alice's expense and making them about the story.* (Disney's film is kind of Puritanical, but Carroll's story is also kind of mean-spirited.) Disney's film transforms the simple introduction of Alice and her sister by making both fully formed characters with clear motivation. In Carroll's story, Alice is largely absent-minded, and she's not really involved in what her sister is doing, which is reading a book to herself. In the Disney film, her sister is giving Alice a history lesson, which leads to Alice dramatically fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to be in a world where 'everything that is isn't, and everything that isn't is,' which she eventually expresses and manifests in song, the wonderfully sentimental and identifiable "In a World of My Own." This is totally different from Carroll's story, where the White Rabbit manifests passively of Alice, who, presumably, has nodded off to sleep, unable to make up her mind of "whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking daisies." In the Disney film, Alice's spiriting away into the nonsense world of Wonderland is spurred by an active desire to be free of the dominant, repressive order represented by her sister and the history book.

Fievel and his family similarly wish to be free of a dominant, repressive historical order, except here, Wonderland is America, the place where 'what is isn't, and what isn't is,' where the things that are absent (food, jobs, equal rights) are present, and where the things that are present (anti-Semites or "cats") are absent. Fievel and his family coming to America and realizing that not only are the streets not paved with gold, but that they are not paved at all, is akin to Alice finally reaching the inverted nonsense world of Wonderland (in the book or in the movie) and finding out that everyone is an rear end in a top hat who just makes up the rules as they go along. Inverting the paradigms of the dominant order has not actually resulted in more freedom or happiness. If anything, Fievel and Alice now have even less control because they are on their own in a world where they are completely unfamiliar with the 'rules' of how to survive. As children, however, they have the ability to also make things up as they go along.

Now, how do Alice and Fievel go about this? In general, the movies are, again, quite similar: the protagonist goes with it, not having any particular plan of action; depending upon the information that others give to her/him; running afoul with some dastardly characters who just want to exploit them and whose repression mirrors the arbitrary dominant order from which they come (there is a Queen in Wonderland, and there are anti-Semites/nativists in America); and, finally, their sense of helplessness at being able to 'find their way home' when they are sick of the broken promises of Wonderland/America leads them to being totally self-pitying (Alice sings "Very Good Advice," and Fievel cries a lot).

There is a key difference. For all of the inconsistencies and problems of the Disney film (and there are a lot of them), Alice eventually comes to see through the bullshit. When she's put on trial by the Queen of Hearts, she reaches the point of being totally exacerbated with the entire scenario, and calls her a "fat, pompous, bat-tempered old tyrant." Though she is terrified when the Cheshire Cat repeats this, it is important to keep in mind that the Cheshire Cat is part of her imagination; he is her id, the thing that goes after and humiliates the Queen even if her very life is threatened.


See this face? This face says, "Just cut my loving head off, already."

Significantly, the Disney film changes the ending. In the book, the pack of cards swarms over Alice and she is awoken by her sister. She tells her sister about her dream, and when her sister encourages her to go back inside for tea, suddenly, the story switches to her perspective, such that she begins having the same dreams as Alice. She then begins to have nostalgia for Wonderland - in spite of all its madness and terror - and fantasizes about being a grown woman and telling her own children the story. In the Disney film, the sister coldly dismisses Alice before she can get her thoughts together. She doesn't listen to her, and they both head back home for tea. The lesson of the film is only slightly ambiguous enough that we can still remember the cartoon world of Wonderland like we might Wackyland of the Clampett, but it's abundantly clear that the characters have instead learned to take comfort in the stability of a world where everything that is is, and everything that isn't isn't. There's no overt appreciation for the fantastic and non-didactic storytelling that is embedded in Carroll's writing. It doesn't fit with Disney's moralizing model, which, ironically, needs to make everything an allegory even when it doesn't work. But Alice is still the same person: the girl who doesn't pay attention to the history lesson and allows the child audience to get the 'real story,' which is still the one where she calls out the "pack of cards" and learns to reject the naive fantasia of her own making.


"We have got to do something about these cats... not the conspicuous system of exploitation," which apparently would magically go away if there weren't any cats.

Fievel, as opposed to Alice, doesn't learn a single God drat thing, largely because the movie doesn't make any sense, even in a nonsense way. When he is abducted by Warren T. and sold to the sweat shop, we are given explicit evidence that Warren T. - who we eventually learn is a cat in disguise - is exploiting the racial solidarity of the mice to keep them terrified and complacent. Notice how, even when it is revealed Warren T. is secretly a cat, this doesn't resolve that the sweat shop is owned by another complicit mouse. In spite of what Gussie says, there problem of the mice is not that they can't get organized; it's that they're so credulous to the myth of America. Gussie's very existence - a wealthy and distinguished mouse who works with the gullible Honest John (they might as well be the Queen and King of Hearts in terms of the clear innuendo that is played off their relationship), who himself is like the most perverted sanitation of an immigrant political boss - is proof that structures of class persist even within the multiethnic mouse communities. The premise of the film's climax is that the idea of using fear tactics against the cats is an idea so novel that it could only come from a naive child. But this hasn't solved the problem that there are mice who oppress other mice. Instead, something that is explicitly introduced in the first half of the film is just completely ignored so that we can all feel good that the cats are literally shanghaied. (The joke is that in China they eat cats. This movie is racist as poo poo.)


"Why are they building that statue? What does it stand for? F'weedom!" What the Hell is 'f'weedom'? It's a cutesy, sanitized, sentimental version of 'freedom' that whitewashes history to make a progressive teleological point about conformity. You know who else talks like Gussie? Elmer Fudd.

The resolution of An American Tail is that everything turns out okay even though there are still mice who are exploiting child labor. I mean, it's laughable in one sense that apparently Fievel - this poor kid from Eastern Europe - is such a fish out of water that he has to be forced into labor, rather than seeking out employment for himself as a matter of fact of the societies they live in (this movie doesn't give a poo poo about history); but the movie is just so exploitative in its drive to coerce the spectator into the starry-eyed view of 'Wonderland' that it's even willing to ignore itself. The lesson of the movie is not to reject naivety and forge a world of your own, but to get rid of the 'bad element' that is stopping America from being AMERICA, HOME OF THE FREE. Don't be an individual, kids. Just conform to what everybody else thinks would make society better. Nobody learns anything because there's nothing to learn. Wonderland is great, and all the scary bits are just the necessary evil to achieve a naive, perfect dream world; rather than terror being the thing that teaches us to overcome and reject repression.

"But what about Tiger?" Tiger is only good because he's a selfish idiot. He has no attachment to the cats and is totally willing to stab them all in the back so he can have his little mouse friends. Tiger has white guilt, but he's on nobody's 'side.' He doesn't want anything except the right to be stupid and happy. And, again, the film never addresses that, up until this point, he has been directly complicit in the persecution of the mice. There's no realization that something is wrong, because nothing is wrong. God's creation is perfect, and God's creation is America. He represents a false conceit of solidarity between the teleology of America and the goals of the mice, which is not to undo oppression but to reverse the nativist paradigm onto the new Other. Tiger is still a racist, he just 'realizes' that Fievel and his mouse friends are the 'true Americans,' and that the other cats are the 'real' outsiders who need to be 'sent back where they come from.'

* Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down-stairs! ... Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!" (Which was very likely true.)" - In the film, they only use the first line, which comes off as a sarcastic quip that makes Alice seem smart, as opposed to Carroll's joke, which is that Alice is really not a very smart child, and that she doesn't quite grasp the 'rules' of her own world any more than Wonderland.

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Pixeltendo
Mar 2, 2012


Fievel goes west is the best Don bluth sequel not by Don bluth.

Then the T.V series/3rd movie made it all just a dream :downs:

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