Neil Sharpson's Blog, page 14

Shortstember: The Final Flight of the Osiris

Studio: Square Pictures

Director: Andy Jones

Writer: The Wachowskis

Wha’ happen?

In a sparring programme, Captain Thadeus of the Zion hovercraft Osiris and his first mate (in more ways than one) Juen swordfight while blindfolded. This doesn’t, as you might expect, result in horrific injuries but instead with them just getting progressively more naked.

This ass is important to the story, shut up.

They’re interrupted when the Osiris comes across an army of half a million machine sentinels and a big fuck-off drill, burrowing into the Earth’s crust right over Zion, the last human city. Rushing to warn Zion, the Osiris flees the pursuing sentinels. Juen volunteers to enter the Matrix leave a message in a dropbox. The sentinels overpower the Osiris but Juen manages to relay the message before the ship is destroyed and she drops dead.

How was it?

Probaby the least “animé” of all the shorts, this one feels most of a piece with the original trilogy. Everything from the score to the colour scheme to the dialogue feels like it could just slot very neatly into the films. One thing I really admired about the Wachowskis was their commitment that everything mattered. There was no “expanded universe”, every part (whether film, short film or computer game) was equally canon. Sure, you don’t have to see Osiris to make sense of Matrix Reloaded but if you have seen it you’re never in any doubt that it happened in this universe. The events here are referenced and are always consistent with the rest of the franchise. I like that. The animation was some of the most jaw dropping CGI I had ever seen in 2003 and in 2022 it holds up amazingly well. Sure, the sword striptease might seem like shameless pandering (and it is) but it’s also a demonstration of technical power. The flesh of these characters moves realistically and organically, these bodies tense and flex and sweat organically. It’s mighty impressive today. Twenty years ago it was bloody witchcraft.

It’s light on story, lighter on dialogue and pretty insubstantial. But as a visually stunning, slick little thriller it gets the job done.

Shortstember: The Animatrix

What is The Matrix?

The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us.

Well, okay, it’s not. But it used to be. In those weird few years surrounding the turn of the millennium the Matrix was an absolute phenomenon, genuinely one of the most influential movie franchises of all time. In fact, I’d argue that it was a victim of its own success. Its aesthetic was so instantly iconic and easily replicable that it quickly became cliché. Movies don’t look like the Matrix anymore because so many movies released around that time aped its look and suddenly it wasn’t cool anymore. And make no mistake, the Matrix was all about being cool. Less a story than a vibe.

No, that’s not fair. The Matrix’s intellectual depth may have been exaggerated but if you’d never heard of Descartes it could and did give an entry point into various philosophical ideas. Its language and concepts have filtered into our discourse (red pills, bread pills) and has gone on to inspire many a modern science fiction writer (DID I MENTION RECENTLY I WROTE A BOOK?). It’s a damn impressive legacy for a series that, if we’re brutally honest, consisted of one good (if by no means flawless) film, two mediocre sequels and a filmed cry for help.

This movie has a scene where Lana Wachowski’s self-insert cries in the bath because Warner Brothers (WHO ARE MENTIONED BY NAME) are forcing him to create a fourth Matrix. I am not making a word of that up.

Oh, and it also gave us the subject of this years Shortstember, the Animatrix. This is an anthology series that came about when the Wachowskis visited Japan to promote the first Matrix and visited some of the animé studios that had been such a huge influence on their work. They then commissioned those studios to create nine short films set in the world they had created, which were then released on DVD and on online to promote the second film, Matrix Reloaded. For something basically created as an advertisement for another movie, The Animatrix went on to become the most critically acclaimed part of this entire franchise with the exception of the original film.

So join me this Shortstember as we review the Animatrix. Which ones are good, which ones are bad, and which ones are like wiping your arse with silk.

“You break the rules and become a hero. I do it and I become the enemy. That doesn’t seem fair.”

“And I know he’s here…”

I had a realisation when I heard that line. In the eighth episode of Wandavision, “Previously On”, Wanda Maximoff enters SWORD Headquarters to try and retrieve the body of her lover, the Vision. And something about how Elizabeth Olsen delivers that line. Some mixture of ragged sorrow, aggrieved entitlement and barely contained rage…like a soul that’s been crushed into diamond-hardness by life’s cruelties. It’s absolutely terrifying. And that’s when I realised that Elizabeth Olsen is the best actor in the MCU.

Now, a while back I said that I would be reviewing all of the Disney Plus Marvel shows as part of this series, but, in my defence, that was before I had seen most of them. In fact it was right around the time that Wandavision had me convinced that it was one of the most exciting, radical genre TV shows I’d seen in years. That’s…not how it turned out. The Wandavision finale wasn’t terrible, by any means, but for something that was shaping up to be the MCU’s answer to Twin Peaks to end in just another CGI blob fight in the sky…

Well, I wasn’t angry. But I was disappointed. And it turned out that Wandavision was the highpoint, so let’s just breeze quickly through the rest.

Not bad, really liked the John Walker arc, the Isiah Bradley stuff was cool but the villain was just nails-on-a-chalkboard and the two leads were the least compelling part. C+

Didn’t see it. I mean, I watched it but the whole thing was so underlit I don’t even know what happened. Picked up a bit towards the end with the Kang reveal but the writing needed to be a lot sharper for a show about the MCU’s wittiest character. C-

Damn, Marvel just does NOT like Star Lord, huh? This one’s hard to judge, any anthology show is going to have ups and downs. Overall, I think it balances out to be a B-.

Quit after episode 3. Automatic F.

Okay, a Hawkeye series is a tough lift. Fair enough. But how do you fuck up Moon Knight? I quit this twice. I tried to power through because I love the character but life is too damn short. Two Fs.

And I haven’t seen Ms Marvel or She Hulk yet.

Oh, but it looks GREAT.

So that’s us all caught up.

Multiverse of Madness is basically a thrown gauntlet to the audience. Prior to this, the TV corner of the MCU (whether that was on ABC, Netflix, Hulu or Disney +) was completely vestigial to the films. In fact, prior to Charlie Cox showing up as Matt Murdock in No Way Home, I can’t think of a single instance when the TV properties were even acknowledged in a main series movie (prove me wrong in the comments, folks). MoM though? If you are not at least fully caught up on Wandavision, Loki and What If?

The movie begins with a demon chasing two people through an interdimensional vortex. The two are Doctor Stephen Strange, now sporting a hideous ponytail, and America Chavez, Marvel’s attempt to make fetch happen from a few years back. They’re looking for the Book of Vishanti, a magic tome that grants incredible power. Of course, the correct name is actually the Book of THE Vishanti, a slip up that I’m sure cost Marvel at least 50 million or so at the boxoffice.

They get captured by the demon and Strange, rather than let America fall into its clutches, tries to kill her but is killed himself. In desperation, America opens a portal (her power is opening portals) and she and Strange’s corpse are transported to Earth 616…

No, you know what, I’ve put up with this bullshit long enough and we need to address this. Alright, the whole “616” thing. Why does this number keep showing up in connection with Marvel?

Well actually, yes. In a roundabout way. Maybe. Truth is, the origin of the term is a little muddled. So in 1983 in a Captain Britain story, Captain Britain meets the Captain Britain Corps, a team composed of Captain Britains from across the multiverse.

Rick and Morty didn’t invent shit.

Captain Britain learns that his Earth is designated “616”, and that’s been the name of the main Marvel continuity ever since. Why “616”? According to writer Dave Thorpe, he originally intended 616 to be the designation for an eeeevil parallel universe and thought “666” was too on the nose and so he subtracted 50. (Of course, if you know your biblical history you know that the earliest versions of Revelations actually gives the Number of the Beast as “616”, which to me just proves that Saint John was a massive DC fanboy). But then Alan Moore took over the title and used 616 to refer to Braddock’s home universe without understanding the significance. (Or, quite possibly, he completely understood the significance and did it as a covert “FU” to Marvel). Anyway, doesn’t matter. From then on, the main “home” universe where the vast majority of Marvel stories are set takes place in Earth 616. Here’s the problem. The movies have started referring to the MCU as “616”, since all the way back in The Dark World, before the multiverse even existed. Which is just hideously confusing because, no, the MCU is NOT Earth 616. It’s Earth 199999! This is Earth 616:

Guys? Can we smile for the camera? Somebody? One smile?

So please. Say no to misnumbering fictional universes. This bullshit is hard enough to keep track of as it is.

Anyway, Stephen Strange 61…our Stephen Strange is attending the wedding of Christine Palmer, the one that got away. They reminisce about old times after the service and she asks him if he’s happy because it’s her wedding day and you have to let your exe know that he’s losing. He tells her that of course he’s happy. Massive spoilers: he is not in fact happy.

Anyway, they hear screams and they look out to see a massive monster tearing through New York city. Strange battles the creature with an assist from Wong and after they kill it they discover that it was trying to kill America Chavez, who Stephen recognises from a dream where he tried to kill her and she explains that that was real, and that dreams are just you experiencing the lives of your alternate selves whose live took a different path.

Are the rest of you having perfectly normal dreams where you got into your preferred college or married a different person? Because my alternate selves are going buck fucking wild. I really want to know what choice I made that prevented me from growing lizards out of my vagina because that was a bullet I’ll definitely want to dodge again if it comes up. Secondly, was no one in this universe dreaming before Loki started up the multiverse? Because that would drive you crazy. That would make you run around in your underwear randomly punching people…ahhhhhhhh okay.

Wong and Stephen realise that this monster had witch stank all over it so Stephen decides to pay a visit to Wanda Maximoff, still hiding out in the countryside after her sitcom got cancelled. Wanda is at first perfectly pleasant and helpful and tells Stephen to bring America to her, before realising that he never actually told her America’s name. Her ruse rumbled, Wanda reveals her true form, much witchier and more scarlet than usual.

So, honest question, was anyone surprised by this? I’m not saying it’s a bad twist from a storytelling perspective but it’s certainly not unexpected. If you walked away from Wandavision with the impression that it was anything other than a supervillain origin I don’t know what to tell you.

So Wanda has been driven insane by the loss of her children in Wandavision and the corrupting influence of the Darkhold so she’s going to steal America’s reality hopping power and go to a universe where her sons are still alive.

Now, this raised not one, but two questions for me. First, Billy and Tommy Vision-Maximoff were never actually real. Wanda just conjured them out of nothing. So, since she’s now even more powerful than she was during the events of Wandavision, why can’t she just do that again? Secondly, where the hell is Vision in all of these alternate realities?

But it clicked for me when I realised that the Billy and Tommy we see in this movie aren’t magical creations like the ones in Wandavision. They’re just normal flesh and blood boys who Wanda had with some dude who, presumably, wasn’t an android (begin speculating now please).

My money’s on Thor.

Actually, scratch that. If these kids aged naturally then Wanda had these kids when she was still a teenager. I don’t want any of the Avengers to be the Dad.

Anyway, our Wanda kept getting dreams of these kids which is where she got the idea to create them in Wandavision. Which kinda puts her actions in a very different light. Now she’s less a grieving mother trying to get her kids back, and more an inter-dimensional monster trying to steal away children who she’s never even met but thinks she’s entitled to because she dreamed she was their mother.

Realising that he’s screwed the pooch, Stephen retreats to Kamar-Taj where he and Wong summon all the magic users they can to help defend America from Wanda. Wanda was crazily OP even before she had the Darkhold, of course so she just tears through the city’s defences and America has no choice but to blast into another universe with Stephen tagging along for the ride.

They end up in Earth 838, a solar-punk utopia where the air is clean and food is free as long as you don’t get caught. Unfortunately, America does get caught stealing pizza balls from Pizza Poppa, a street vendor played by Bruce Campbell because Sam Raimi looks after his friends. When Pizza Poppa gets a little aggressive, Steven casts a spell on him forcing him to punch himself which, he tells America, will last for three weeks.

Yeeeeeah. That’s murder.

Strange reasons that their only way to stop Wanda is with the Book of the Vishanti but he doesn’t know how to find it. So, the pair decide to find this universe’s Stephen Strange to see if he knows where it is. On the way, they find Memory Lane, a business that scans your mind and plays holograms of intimate memories that anyone on the street can watch (and you thought the tech industry had a problem with respecting privacy in our universe). Stephen sees a memory of Christine gifting him a watch which, I learned in the course of this review, costs $27,000 in real life. That is too much for a watch. I guess it’s a status symbol, in that “idiocy” is technically a status. Anyway, this watch is now broken from Strange’s crash so it doesn’t even work.

We also learn some more about America here. When she was a child she accidentally activated her powers which caused her mothers to be sucked into a vortex. America’s been looking for them in the multiverse ever since. Also, incredibly minor nitpick but I hate the way Strange asks her who they are and America answers “my moms. Mis madres.”

Bilingual people don’t actually do that. If you speak English but don’t speak Irish, I’m not going to say “I’m Mouse, is mise Mouse” unless I’m showing off that I can speak Irish and that I know you can’t.

You know. Like an asshole.

Anyway, they discover that doctor Strange is dead in this universe, having apparently given his life fighting Thanos. At the Sanctum Sanctorum they meet the new Sorceror Supreme, Karl Mordo.

Strang is wary because Mordo apparently went insane and tried to kill him. Offscreen. Sounds like it might have been interesting to see but whatever. This Mordo seems pretty chill though, and invites them in for tea. Mordo tells them that Darkhold has a spell that will allow Wanda to possess her counterpart in this universe and come after them herself. Stephen asks for Mordo’s help in getting the book of Vishanti and Mordo’s all “sorry, do you take one lump of sleeping drug in your tea or two?”

They wake up in the Baxter Foundation under the supervision of Christine Palmer 838 who tells them that they’re being quarantined until she can make sure they’re not crawling with Multiversal Covid. Mordo then arrives and takes Stephen to meet the Illuminati, a group of superheroes who chose to name themselves after a legendary sinister cabal bent on world domination (did no one run that by PR?)

Anyway, the Illuminati are Mordo, Captain Carter, Reed Richards, Maria Rambeau as Captain Marvel, Charles Xavier and Black Bolt because dammit, Anson Mount is awesome and deserved a chance to do it right. The Illuminati tell Stephen that Stephen 838 used the Darkhold to defeat Thanos but was corrupted by it and went mad with power and the Illuminati had to put him down like magical Old Yeller. Before they can decide whether or not to just extra-judicially murder Stephen (what noble heroes), Wanda attacks while possessing the body of her 838 counterpart.

Wanda’s attack on Illuminati Headquarters is pretty damn great. It’s a great gut punch to introduce all these cool bits of fan-service (Mister Fantastic! Professor X!) and then force us to watch as they are brutally murdered. There’s one scene where Christine is trying desperately to break America out of her cell while in the background a bloodstained Wanda is just ambling up the corridor and I actually muttered “oh shit” in the cinema. She is terrifying. Plus, how better to establish that your villain is an irredeemable monster than by having her break Patrick Stewart’s neck?

Also, I just realised that Patrick Stewart has portrayed the death of the same character onscreen four times now, that’s gotta be a record, right?

Anyway, Christine, Stephen and America flee from Wanda and find the Book of the Vishanti that the Illuminati were guarding. But, Wanda catches them, destroys the book and uses America to banish them to another universe before returning America to the MCU.

Christine and Stephen find themselves in a universe where there’s been an incursion (that’s where two universes crash together) and decide to find this universe’s Stephen Strange to help them get home. Unfortunately, this universe’s Strange has gone a little banana-pants.

Sinister Strange used the Darkhold to try and find a universe where he and Christine were together but apparently, even the infinite possibility of the multiverse can’t make that ship happen. I mean, what would you even call it? Stralmer? Parange? Garbage.

Anyway, they fight and Sinister Strange dies the only appropriate way a wizard can die. Falling from a great height and being impaled on something. Also, I hate to be buzzkill, but our Stephen started that fight and he’d have a damn hard time avoiding a murder charge.

Anyway, Stephen has no choice but to use the Darkhold to possess an alternate version of himself to rescue America. But where could such a thing be found? Well, as Stephen points out, the alternate doesn’t have to be alive and there is a perfectly good Stephen corpse just lying around. So now we get ZOMBIE STRANGE.

It’s a cool twist but I can’t help but find this hilarious. See, around a decade ago The Onion had a running joke of Republican voters gravitating to ever more bizarre candidates like a 19th century prospector, a ball of pure flaming rage or the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan. And damn, if Zombie Strange isn’t a dead (ha) ringer for Zombie Reagan.

Anyway, Zombie Reagan flies to Mount Wundagore where Wanda is preparing to sacrifice America and take her power. With Wong’s help, Strange is able to free America and tells her that the power was in her the whole yada yada yada. America fights Wanda but realises that far more power was in Wanda the whole time than and that she can’t beat her. So, she defeats her through the power of guilt. She opens up a portal to Billy and Tommy’s home in Earth 838 where they are fucking terrified out of their little minds by Wanda. Realising that she’s become a monster, Wanda brings the temple crashing down around herself and destroys all copies of the Darkhold throughout the multiverse.

Back in the wrecked universe, Stephen tells Christine that he loves her and that he wants to take her back to see his universe. She declines, because obviously, but says that it would have been “one hell of an incursion”.

When you really don’t know if she’s talking about your dick and you’re too scared to ask.

The movie ends with America being trained as a sorceror in Kamar-Taj and Stephen repairing his ridiculously overpriced watch, symbolising that he’s ready to put his past behind him and begin a new chapter of his life.

And then he suddenly grows a third eye.

***

Better than Doctor Strange in just about every way but I was damn cold on that movie so that’s not saying much. Multiverse of Madness is about as good as Phase 4 movies get but, well, that’s kinda the problem right? I don’t know, after 28 films maybe I’m just getting tired.

Scoring

Adaptation: 16/25

The story is a bit bloated. The fan-service of the Utopian Earth is nice and all but most of this multiverse isn’t really that mad.

Our Heroic Heroes: 17/25

Strange is pretty sidelined for much of the movie and I’m actually okay with that. I’ve always thought the character works better as a supporting part anyway. That said, I find this Stephen Strange more interesting than the Tony Stark knock off on the first one. This is a more contemplative, introspective Strange, trying to remain detached and cool while doubts over the path his life has taken cloud his mind.

Our Nefarious Villains: 25/25

There have been cool Marvel villains, tragic Marvel villains, compelling Marvel villains.

Scarlet Witch is the first one I consider genuinely scary. Olsen just blows everyone out of the water here.

Our Plucky Sidekicks: 15/25

Okay, fine, when Patrick Stewart rolled in to the theme of the 90s X-Men cartoon I made sounds that got me banned from the cinema. But the supporting cast is pretty flat overall.

The Stinger

Oh, Strange is apparently fine now. He goes about his day when suddenly he’s approached by a blonde woman who opens a portal in the middle of the street and tells him he needs to help her fix an incursion unless he’s chicken. And he just goes with her.

And the audience went…

So let me get this straight, Marvel. Blade gets introduced with one line of dialogue offscreen.

You get Charlize Frickin’ Theron to play a character and give her a big onscreen introduction and she’s not playing, I dunno, Emma Frost? Sue Storm?

She’s playing Cleo? FUCKING CLEO?!

The second stinger

Pizza Poppa, his faced bruised after weeks of self inflicted violence, is finally freed from his curse.

And the audience went

Are there X-Men yet?

We have X-Men in the MCU! I mean, in one of the infinite parallel dimensions that make up the MCU. But still, progress!

FINAL SCORE: 73%

NEXT UPDATE: 15 September 2022

NEXT TIME: With the X-Men series finished, it’s time to tackle a new series of movies, one very close to my heart.

We’re going to review all the Batman movies in order, starting with the first.

“But Mouse, you already reviewed Batman 1989.”“No. Not that one.” “What? You mean the Adam West movie?”“No. There is another…”

Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #60: Encanto

Seagoon:
Any objections?

Milligan:
Ohhh yes! If we build this mountain on England, England would sink under the weight.

Seagoon:
Sink? In that case, this mountain would be invaluable, people could climb up the side and save themselves from drowning!

Milligan:
Mercy, you’re right. Hurry and build it, before we all drown!

The Goon Show: “The Greatest Mountain in the World” (1954)

“Mouse, you explain that opening quote RIGHT NOW!”“What, I can’t reference classic British radio comedy to open my review?”“Listen to me. Encanto is the one good thing to come out of this miserable fucking decade and if you try to ruin it for me…”“Ooookay, how about we take a deep breath?”

Alright, let’s just dispense with the usual dancing around.

Encanto is great. It’s a great piece of animation. It’s an excellent musical and it’s without a doubt my favourite canon movie in a long-ass time. It’s walking out of here with a good grade, don’t nobody worry ’bout that.

But…

I have to confess that what really fascinates me about Encanto is how it keeps making the most basic, obvious mistakes in screen-writing you can imagine (trying to build a mountain that will cause the country to sink), and instead of just fixing them in a sensible way (just not building the mountain) by doubling down and solving those problems in the most ridiculously over the top way possible (actually building the mountain). And it works.

The best example of this is the first song Welcome to the Family Madrigal.

There are twelve named speaking Madrigal characters, all with unique personalities, powers and familial relationships to keep track of. That is, quite frankly, bananas and any sensible screenwriter would have gone through the cast with a machete looking for who could be cut.

Way I see it, for this story you need Mirabelle, two older siblings to establish the pattern that Mirabelle broke by not getting a gift, and then a younger sibling to get a gift to show that Mirabelle really was a fluke. You need Abuela, obviously, Bruno and Julietta. Augustine doesn’t need to be there and Pepa’s entire family is extraneous. And yes, obviously, that would really suck to lose those characters but that would be the sensible choice. The sane choice. But that would not be the Encanto choice.

Encanto instead decides that it’s going to have an opening song flat out admitting “yes, our cast is far too big and complicated and our premise is weird and clunky so here is a song to help you remember”. It shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t work. But simply by dint that it is a phenomenal song it does. They built the goddamn mountain.

But I get ahead of myself. So about that premise.

Okay, so there was this lady named Alma, her husband Pedro and their baby triplets and they were fleeing through the jungle to escape the carnage of the Thousand Days War, a conflict that devastated Colombia at the turn of the 20th century and killed 2.5% of the population and that I first learned about through a Disney cartoon so I guess I’m an ignorant asshole, okay, good to know.

Pedro was killed and in her grief Alma prayed for a miracle which made her candle become magic. The magic candle then closed off the valley from the rest of the world and created a house, which was also magic. And now, every time a member of Alma’s family comes of age they get a magic door in the magic house created by the magic candle which was created by the miracle. When they touch the magic door, they get a magic power and a magic room that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

I’m actually a little angry about how needlessly complicated this premise is. This movie had six credited writers but apparently no one in charge who could just say “no, this is too much. You don’t need all this.” Hey, Lin Manuel Miranda? Let me fix that for you:

Alma was wandering heartbroken in the jungle and she found a magic house.

No! No more things!

“Oh. Sorry. I got…carried away.”

Jesus man.

Also, some of you are going to hate me for this but nix the whole “the house is alive and is also a character” business. Why? Because it’s been done to death. Casita is just Magic Carpet from Aladdin, Ocean from Moana and Gale from Frozen 2. It’s the same character just a house now. Enough.

Okay, so the movie proper begins with the family preparing for 5 year old Antonio Madrigal to receive his gift. This is a difficult time for Mirabel, the youngest daughter of Alma’s daughter Julietta, because the last ceremony was hers and she got bupkiss. After being harrangued by some exposition starved local waifs, Mirabel launches into Welcome to the Family Madrigal, a song which, by all the laws of God, man and screenwriting should not work but does.*

For a song that is basically the musical equivalent of that scene in Meet the Robinsons where Wilbur Robinson gives a power point presentation on the insanely over bloated cast, this is an astonishingly good song, probably the best post-Hamilton thing Miranda has ever written. In a whirlwind of meticulously intricate rhymes and an infectious beat, Mirabel tells the children about her entire family, their powers, their relationships and the fact that her Uncle was almost certainly murdered and the family is covering it up.

“They say he saw the future, one day he disappeared…”“Whoah, Abuela she won’t let us call the cops, but OH! you kids should DEFINITELY CALL THE COPS (oh shit, she’s seen us just smile children, just smile and be chill).”

Good a time as any to talk about the animation. Disney established its current house style in 2010 with Tangled and in my opinion they are way, waaay overdue a shakeup. But, if they are going to continue to make movies in this style, may they all look as good as Encanto.

I love the skin, hair and faces of these women.

Sorry. Let me rephrase that in a way that sounds less serial-killery.

The way the skin and hair of these characters is rendered is absolutely phenomenal, probably the best of any CGI Disney movie. But the real triumph is how much emotional clarity and humour the characters can express solely through their faces. And, to be clear, this movie absolutely needs that. In his review, Tim Brayton described the movie’s central plot as “a girl talks to each member of her large family, one at a time” and, well, yeah. It’s a movie that’s banking on you caring enough about the relationships of its characters that you won’t mind that there is really very little story. Fortunately, in my opinion at least, that bet pays off because the character designs are so appealing and expressive that for the most part you do care.

So we’ve established that Mirabel doesn’t have a gift and she compensates by being incredibly can-do and positive. Not helping things is Abuela, who used to be really close to Mirabel but, ever since her failed gifting, has kind of treated her like a problem to be managed. Antonio’s ceremony goes off without a hitch and he gets the power to talk to animals. And the knowledge that she really was just a fluke finally breaks through Mirabel’s happy veneer and she shows how much this is killing her. This brings us to our second song, Waiting on a Miracle, an excellent “I want” song where she reveals how much it sucks when your family is the Justice League and you’re Snapper Carr.

Where’s his movie Warners? Do it, you cowards.

After the song, Mirabel sees a crack spreading through the walls of the house and the candle starts to sputter. She runs back and crashes Antonio’s party and warns everyone that the house is breaking apart but when they go and look everything’s fine. Abuela tells everyone to ignore the Crazy Girl who’s talking all crazy and even Julietta warns Mirabel not to go down the path of her brother Bruno, which really sounds like a threat.

Later that night, however, Mirabel overhears Abuela praying and learns that the house’s magic is fading. So Mirabel decides to Nancy Drew this shit. Like any good detective mystery, the first port of call is to consult the local snitch.

Mirabel’s cousin Dolores has super acute hearing which allows her to hear everything going on in the house. She tells Mirabel that on the night of the ceremony she overheard Mirabel’s older sister Luisa’s eye twitching all night long. Now with her first lead, Mirabel confronts Luisa who sings Surface Pressure, another excellent song about how the constant pressure of being the family’s donkey lifter is starting to stress her out. Awesome song, although I will never forgive it for one massive missed oppurtunity.

Did no one making this realise Disney already had a Hercules?

Anyway, Mirabel and Luisa share a hug and Luisa tells Mirabel that at the exact time the cracks appeared, Luisa felt weak. She also tells Mirabel that Bruno apparently had a vision of the magic failing right before he disappeared, and suggests Mirabel searches his tower.

Each of the Magical Madrigals have their own pocket universe in their room, but since he left, Bruno’s has started to collapse and decay. In the ruins, Mirabel finds glowing green shards that are the remains of Bruno’s vision and gathers them up before the whole place collapses in.

While the family prepares for Isabella’s engagement dinner to local himbo Mariano, Mirabel asks around about this Bruno character. This, of course, leads to We Don’t Talk About Bruno, the song that conquered harder than Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan combined. I really don’t have anything to say about the song that you don’t already know. It’s an ear-wormy masterpiece and that’s that. What I will say is that this is another “building the mountain” moment for the film. The movie deals with the fact that a lot of its cast is technically extraneous by making them so appealing and instantly iconic that even with the limited screen time most of them have, they’re indelibly memorable. Take Felix, for instance:

More or less completely irrelevant to the plot. Hardly any screentime. But damn, you’d miss him, wouldn’t you? Because every time he’s on screen he just lights it up and you actually learn a lot from him and his relationships with the other family members through little tiny details. Abuela is the most emotionally guarded, reserved, almost austere character in the whole movie. So when you see her dancing with Felix…

That tells you a lot about both characters. So yeah, I probably would have advised them not to build the mountain. But now that they did. Damn. That is a fine mountain.

Anyway, Mirabel finally reassembles Bruno’s vision and learns what the terrible threat to the family’s happiness is…

Oof.

The engagement dinner is a complete disaster as Dolores overhears Mirabel telling her father about the vision and then it just spreads like a virus. The house starts cracking and Pepa loses control of her weather making powers and the whole thing’s a washout. Mirabel sees some rats running off with the pieces of the vision and she follows them through a secret passage where she meets…BRUNO.

So it turns out Bruno did not run away, and has been living secretly in the house this whole time. Bruno tells Mirabel that the night she didn’t get her gift Abuela asked him to look into the future and he saw Mirabel destroying their home (or possibly saving it). To protect Mirabel, he smashed the vision and then left the house which, y’know, he didn’t really have to do. But still, nice gesture.

But Mirabel reasons that visions are like parents. If you don’t like the answer you get the first time, ask another one and maybe you’ll get to go on that sleepover. Reluctantly, Bruno tries again and sees the same vision of Mirabel destroying the Encanto but with a new sequence, Mirabel embracing Isabella and strengthening the candle.

So it’s either hug Isabela or let her family’s home be destroyed which obviously is a tough call.

Mirabel goes to Isabela’s room and tries to apologies but instead makes her so angry she manifests a cactus (not a euphemism, but should be). Isabela has a joyous realisation that she doesn’t just have to make pretty perfect flowers and can grow cool plants that fuck. She realises this through a song that Disney insists is called What Else Can I Do? but is actually called Let it Grow and no one can convince me different.

Mirabel and Isabela embrace and the candle burns more brightly but Abuela shows up and accuses Mirabel of sabotaging the family because she resents not having a gift. Furious, Mirabel tells Abuela that the reason their home is falling apart at the seams is because Abuela has placed such unreasonable expectations on all of them.

And then the house collapses.

Homeless and powerless, the family search for Mirabel. Abuela finally finds her on the banks of the river where she got the miracle that gave her a magic candle that built her a magic house. Abuela tells her how she came to the Encanto and how her grandfather died through the song Dos Oruguitas and she tells her that Mirabel was right. They reconcile and they are then found by Bruno riding a creepily photorealistic horse.

These two things came from different universes and it ain’t right.

Abuela embraces Bruno and they ride back to the rest of the family.

We get our final song, All of You, where the family rebuild their home with the help of all the townspeople the family helped over the years. Oh, and Isabela gets out of her engagement to Mariano, who’s devastated, but fortunately Dolores is there to snatch up those sloppy seconds.

To thank Mirabel, the family give her the knob to place in the front door which restores the Encanto to life and gives everyone back their gifts. And the movie ends with the family reunited and Mirabel finally at peace with her place in the family.

***

Encanto is just a tad too flawed for me to call it an unqualified return to greatness, and that we should just pretend that the last few movies didn’t happen. But, it definitely is cause for hope. And even the weird shagginess of its premise and its refusal to streamline its large cast speaks to something that has been sorely missing from Disney movies of this era: Passion. I suspect Raya had a huge cast because they wanted to sell Happy Meal toys. I think that Encanto has a huge cast because they loved these characters too much to leave them on the cutting room floor. And you know what? Sometimes it takes integrity to not kill your darlings. Ultimately, we get a messy but beautiful film with some phenomenal songs and an important message. Welcome back, guys.

Here’s to the next 10 years.

“Don’t we own you yet?”

Scoring

Animation: 19/20

Tempted to go a full twenty, but using computers is cheating.

Lead: 20/20

How would you improve Mirabel as a character? I honestly don’t know how you could.

Villain: N/A

“Oooooh we’re a Disney movie in the 2020s. We’re too GOOD for villains now.”

Supporting Characters: 19/20

So much love and care went into crafting these characters.

Music: 20/20

Anything less would be more insufferably contrarian than even I could stomach.

Which means…oh no.

“What have I done?”“Why, what ever’s the matter Mouse?““No. That voice, it can’t be!”Hello again, my little furry friend.“Holy shit! Lore! Actual lore!”“The wyvern guy!”Do you understand the brilliance of my revenge? I crafted the perfect movie to break your ranking system. Near flawless animation, lead, supporting characters and music. AND A TERRIBLE SCRIPT.

“NO! YOU CAN’T MEAN!”Yeeessss.. This is now your Number 1 Disney movie! I’VE RUINED YOUR RANKINGS FOREVER!!!

ARBITRARY DEDUCTION OF POINTS FOR CLUNKY SCREENPLAY: -15%

WHAT SORCERY IS THIS?!“It’s my blog. I can just…decide the score.”I spent three years on this plan. I…went to Julliard to learn how to write musicals. I…worked SO HARD…“Great to see you again, buddy.”

FINAL SCORE: 82%

NEXT UPDATE: 01 September 2022

NEXT TIME:

* Okay everyone, I need your help. What the FUCK does the first kid shout at Mirabel through the window? I hear it as “Hey! When’s Matt’s gift happen?” which makes no sense. The captions on the YouTube video say “Hey! where’s my gift at?” which is clearly not what he’s saying AND makes no sense and the Disney Plus subtitles say “Hey! When’s the magic gift happen?” which makes sense but is CLEARLY not what what he actually says.

Live Action Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse: Alice in Wonderland

Guys, be honest.

Am I just an unpleasable asshole?

A rule I really, really try to stick to in reviewing movies is this: never criticise someone else’s work unless you can articulate what you would have done differently. This is not to say that I have no constructive criticism of 2010’s Alice in Wonderland. I would, in fact, venture that I have quite the stack, teetering precariously in the corner as I write these words, ready to crush my tiny little mouse bones at the slightest inopportune breeze. And yet, I can’t help but feeling that a lot of what I am about to say might come across as a touch hypocritical if you are a long time reader of this blog.

“Mouse! Good news! We’ve remade Alice in Wonderland!”“That’s bad news! I famously despise Lewis Carroll’s inexplicably beloved original novels!”“Good news! The movie simply takes the setting and characters and works them into a new live action adventure!”“That’s bad news! The only screen version of this story I enjoy is the original 1951 Disney feature and I hate your modern live action bastardisations of classic cartoons!”“Good news! The movie borrows NOTHING of the original cartoon and attempts to forge a bold new path with its own aesthetic and continuity!”“Did I…did I make you happy? PLEASE tell me I made you happy!”

So I kinda feel like I’m not reviewing this in good faith. I mean, is this movie a travesty of Carroll’s original work, crunching it into a generic Lord of the Rings rip-off slathered in a thin veneer of anachronistic corporate feminism to appeal to the broadest possible global audience so that Disney can bank another €1 billion dollars for the death ray fund?

Yes. It is that thing I said.

But how the hell am I supposed to make that argument? If this is a bad Alice, then what would meet my definition of a “good” Alice, considering I can’t stand the source material? (It occurs to me that I haven’t actually read either of the novels in two decades. I may need to go back and give them another go).

Well, I suppose it would be a movie that was able to do what the 1951 movie did, make me like the story of Alice through sheer artistic brilliance. I love the ’51 Alice not because it’s an Alice movie, but because it’s a Disney movie, possibly the most Disney movie of that era.

You’ve got Mary Blair on backgrounds. Verna Felton, Ed Wynne, Sterling Holloway and J. Pat O’Malley on vocals. The Nine Old Men directing animation. Music by Oliver Wallace. The movie works because it takes Carroll’s novel, sands off the creepier and more unpleasant elements, and uses the episodic nature of the story to allow some of the most talented men and women to ever work in animation to go buck wild. So I suppose, that’s what I want from an Alice in Wonderland adaptation. Something that can overcome the weaknesses of the source material by just being really, really beautiful.

“OH SHIT!”

So, it’s 1855 and British merchant Charles Kingsley is discussing his newest business venture with Victorian Britain’s finest moustache enthusiasts. Take a look at this exchange of dialogue:

LORD ASCOT
Charles, you have finally lost your senses.

A COLLEAGUE
This venture is impossible.

CHARLES KINGSLEY
For some. Gentlemen, the only way to achieve the impossible is to believe it is possible.

A COLLEAGUE
That kind of thinking could ruin you.

CHARLES KINGSLEY
I’m willing to take that chance. Imagine trading posts in Rangoon, Bangkok, Jakarta…

So, first point. This movie is set in 1855, so Kingsley rhapsodising about trading posts in South East Asia is a bit like me saying “imagine it readers! The human voice carried by telegraph wave!”. This ain’t exactly the radical, out of the box thinking the movie presents it as. But mostly I just want to draw attention to how bland and generic the dialogue is. There’s no craft or artistry to it. It just serves the function of telling you that Kinglsey is a maverick and his fusty buddies (or “fuddies”) think that he’s a loose cannon.

Their meeting is interrupted by Kingsley’s daughter, Alice, who was woken up by a bad dream. Kingsley pauses his super important business meeting and goes to tuck her in. She tells him about these weird dreams that she’s been having and he gives her some advice about being true to herself so you know this motherfucker is going to die. Like, he will be lucky to survive to the next scene. Sure enough, we cut to thirteen years later and Pa Kingsley has kicked the bucket and the now teenage Alice is being taken to to the home of Lord Ascot so that she can be proposed to by his awful son, Hamish. I recommend this whole sequence for a game of Bad Victorian Hollywood History Bingo. Don’t forget to down the bottle when our heroine complains about corsets being a tool of repression!

Oh, and look at this.

They’ve thrown this engagement party together and they didn’t even tell Alice she was being proposed to. Like, guys. It’s Victorian England. It’s not Ancient Sumer. If you ask her to marry you, she can say “no”. I mean, what kind of guy has the kind of insane egotism to throw an engagement party before the girl has even said she’ll marry him or even expressed any romantic in him?

I knew Gaston. Gaston was a friend of mine.
And you, sir, are no Gaston.

After Hamish proposes in front of half of the cast of Downton Abbey, Alice runs off into the garden and falls down a rabbit hole and we get our first look at Wonderland.

Wonderland? More like…shit. Land. Yeah.

Look, it’s all ugly and unpleasant and undefinably creepy so points for fidelity to the source material, I guess. After the usual business with the key and the shrinking “drink me” bottle and leaves her roughly the size of Robert Downey Junior she meets Tweedledum, Tweedledee, the White Rabbit, the Door-Mouse…um…I think the Dodo’s in there. Couple of flowers. They take her to see “Absolom” which is what we’re supposed to call the Caterpillar now, apparently. The rabbit asks Absolom if Alice is “The Alice” who is apparently a Chosen One destined to slay the “Jabberwocky”. Of course, “Jabberwocky” is actually the name of the poem, the beast is simply called “the Jabberwock” but shit, like that’s my biggest beef with this movie?

Absalom tells the assorted residents of the Uncanny Valley that Alice is “not hardly” the prophesied Alice which is super helpful. Suddenly, the are attacked by the forces of the Red Queen (who is the Cronenberg-esque result of merging Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts with Looking Glass‘s Red Queen) including a ferocious Bandersnatch. Alice, thinking that this is all a dream, tries to just get eaten by the Bandersnatch to escape the matrix but she’s rescued by the Dormouse who GOUGES OUT THE BANDERSNATCH’S EYE WITH HER LITTLE SWORD.

“DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF NARNIA!”

The Knave of Hearts who’s played by Crispin Glover (who I’ve just realised is almost certainly a vampire because he hasn’t aged since Back to the Future) finds the prophecy and takes it to the Red Queen of Hearts played by a version Helena Bonham Carter that escaped from the Macroverse.

“Hey Georgie.”

The Queen sends her bloodhound Bayard to track down Alice, promising him that she’ll release his wife and puppies if he does.

It’s at this point that I once again find myself asking; what do I want from this movie? Or, to put it another way, should Wonderland matter? In the original novels, Wonderland and Mirrorland do not matter. There are no stakes in these stories. None of the characters, except, sort of, Alice, have any kind of rich emotional inner life or arcs that we are invited to care about. It’s all just nonsense. Creepy, plonking, unfunny Victorian nonsense, to be sure, but ultimately it’s not a story. It’s just stuff happening.

That seems like it should be a problem to be fixed in any adaptation. It should be good that the movie is trying to inject actual emotional and narrative stakes into the world of Wonderland (or “Underland”, as this movie obnoxiously insists on calling it). But, even if you put aside the fact that the script is dull and uninspired and the whole thing is drenched in this nasty, drab, chintzy CGI veneer, Carroll just didn’t make that kind of world. You can’t turn Wonderland in Middle Earth. The world doesn’t make any kind of logical sense, the characters have next to no history or interaction with each other. And most vitally, nothing matters. Nobody in Wonderland really cares about anything or anyone, least of all themselves. They’re all mad, you see. And in a world built on “lol, who cares?”, you can’t convince the audience that that they should, in fact, “lol care”. It’s like trying to make a fortress out of a doll’s house. You’re better off scrapping the whole thing and starting with new foundations.

Anyway, Alice escapes but is wounded by the Bandersnatch. The Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) finds her and explains that the wound will fester if she doesn’t find someone to magically heal her. He then takes her to meet the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. The Hatter (Johnny Depp), explains that that the Red Queen conquered Underland (feh) from her sister the White Queen and that he joined the resistance after the Jaberwock burned his family alive which was just rude.

“I’ll say it was rude! It was very, very rude! I was TRAUMATISED!”

The Knave arrives and the Hatter allows himself to be captured so that Alice can escape. She’s found by the Bloodhound, who’s actually working for the resistance and agrees to take her to the Queen’s Castle so she can rescue the Hatter.

She does this by crawling over the severed heads of the Queen’s Victims. God, Lewis Carroll would be furious.

“Fuck! Why didn’t I think of that!?”

The White Rabbit helps Alice by giving her some “Eat Me” cake which causes her to grow to a massive size. The Queen finds her and Alice takes on the alias “Um” and the Queen lets her stay because I think she’s got a giantess fetish (no judgement).

While in the palace, she steals the vorpal sword, which the Chosen One is destined to use to slay the Jabberwock and escapes with it to the palace of the White Queen. Now, I’ll give the movie one shiny nugget of praise: the casting. The casting is honestly top tier. Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, hell even Depp as the Hatter works for me far better than I’d want to admit. Mila Wasikowska is kinda lost as Alice but honestly I’ll put that on the script, I think she’s doing as well as she can. But if I had to choose the one actor who’s my MVP it’s Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, pretty much the only one here who actually seems to be having fun.

We’re introduced to her with the following exchange of dialogue with one of her retainers:

“The trees seem sad. Have you been speaking to them?”

“Yes, your Majesty.”

“Perhaps a bit more kindly?”

She’s playing a Disney princess turned up to 11 and with absolute sincerity and it’s honestly the high point of the whole film.

The White Queen gives Alice a potion to return her to her regular size. Meanwhile, the Cheshire Cat rescues the Hatter from being executed and he leads the Red Queen’s subjects in an uprising against her. The White Queen and the Red Queen’s armies meet on a chessboard and oh for fuck’s sake…

Alice of Arc here fights and slays the Jabberwock, cutting off its head. The Red Queen’s troops surrender and the White Queen banishes her and the Knave of Hearts. Alice says goodbye to all her friends, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the Scarecrow, who she’ll miss most of all.

Alice wakes up in a hole in the garden with no time having passed at all and everyone still waiting on her to accept Hamish’s proposal. So what has she learned, our Alice? How have her adventures changed her? Well, she tell Hamish to go pound sand and then tells his father that…she wants to go into business with him.

And the movie ends with Alice heading her father’s company and preparing to open a trade route to Hong Kong.

I’m sorry what?

WHAT?

That’s the arc? Alice, the oddball, dreamy misfit who was never able to conform to the stifling strictures of Victorian womanhood goes on an epic quest to discover her true self and comes out the other side…a titan of Imperial capitalism ready to plunder the riches of the Orient and crush all who would resist her? REALLY?

That’s how you end this? Well. It’s unexpected, I’ll give you that.

“But the Chinese shall never trade with us!”
“One word, sir. OPIUM.”

***

I never bought Martin Scorcese’s criticism of the Marvel movies that they weren’t “cinema”. But I think he should have aimed his shot at a different spot on Disney’s great, ever-expanding hide. Alice 2010 just doesn’t feel like a movie. It’s a Potemkin village of a film, convincing from far away but fundamentally empty and hollow. Nothing about this feels like it comes from a true place of love or affection for the source material, or any impulse higher than “strengthen the brand”.

Alice in Wonderland deserved better than this movie. And when it’s me saying that…

Ways it improves on the original: The original what? The original Disney movie? Not a single solitary way. On the book? Eh. I do like Hathaway’s White Queen.

Ways it doesn’t: It’s so lazy of me to say “all of it”. But I’m a lazy Mouse.

“All of it.”

How angry did this movie make me?: Honestly, this just washed over me like a lukewarm bath. I felt nothing stronger than boredom.

FINAL SCORE: 31%

NEXT UPDATE: 18 August 2022

Now, because I choose to.

Ten years…

Jesus Christ.

Ten years ago, I tried to start a blog on That Guy with the Glasses. I decided I was going to review all 52 canon Disney movies. I had no real background in film criticism. I didn’t know much about animation other than I liked it and could express opinions with colourful profanity and pop culture references. I had a juvenile, 2010s sense of humour. Back then, it was all it took.

After a false start where I realised that the TGWTG website was a clunky unusable mess (and because I suspected this Doug Walker fellow was a bad egg), I struck out on my own and threw together a simple wordpress site. And here we are.

It’s hard to succinctly sum up something that has taken up over a quarter of your life. Mouse has changed almost as much as Neil Sharpson has. When I first wrote that Snow White review I had hopes and fears. I hoped, madly, that I’d become a huge internet star based on a text blog (highly unlikely in 2012, absolutely impossible now). And I feared that the blog would just vanish into obscurity or that I’d get bored or disillusioned or quit a few weeks in. Neither happened.

Instead, it just lived. It just kept going. Through highs and lows. Mine and everyone else’s.

It’s been a wild ten years, hasn’t it? I mean wild in its original meaning. Feral. Untamed. Unpredictable. Red in tooth and claw. One long journey through Bahia.

This blog used to be my lifeline. Back when I was a young, frustrated man desperately wanting to be told I was funny or clever or a good writer I needed this blog so badly. I wrote because I had to. Because I needed, desperately to be seen.

I don’t need the blog any more. I write for a living. I’m doing the thing I always dreamed of doing, and amazingly, it’s every bit as wonderful as I hoped. But the blog won’t be going anywhere. Because I still love it. And I do it now, because I choose to.

If I hope anything about this blog, it’s that it was for you what it was for me. A little safe harbour on the mad churning sea of the internet. A place where no one was trying to make you angry or sell you something. A place where we could be people. Or mice. Same thing, really.

Ten years. Did it matter? It mattered to me. I hope it did to you, too.

“Thank you all. From the bottom of my heart.”“Well, you know how you can thank us all?”“Oh fine.”

NEXT TIME:

Rhapsody Rabbit versus The Cat Concerto

Alright, picture the scene. It’s Ireland. The mid-nineties. Deep in the Nirvana era.

A young Mouse is, get this, watching cartoons. Specifically, I’m watching the classic 1947 Tom and Jerry short, The Cat Concerto. Slowly, as I watched, a curious sensation of deja vu began to wash over me. I turned to my parents and asked, curiously:

“Um…didn’t this cartoon used to be about Bugs Bunny?”

My parents patiently explained to me that, no, cartoons don’t swop out characters and I must have just remembered the cartoon wrong. So. I went along with my life, carrying razor sharp memories of a cartoon where Bugs Bunny battles a mouse on a piano while trying to play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2 and grimly resigned to the fact that I was just insane.

Little did I know that I had innocently stumbled onto one of the biggest controversies and most enduring and intractable mysteries in the history of animation. Rhapsody Rabbit versus The Cat Concerto.

Scandal at the 1947 Academy Awards

Ah, the 1947 Oscars. Who could forget The Best Years of Our Lives, the highest grossing picture of the 1940s and its epic nine Oscar sweep? Who could forget Harold Russell’s historic Supporting Actor win, the first for a non-professional actor? Or the fact that he became the first, and so far only, actor to be twice honoured by the Academy for the same performance?

Pretty much everybody. No, today, if the 1947 Oscars are remembered at all, it’s for the moment when Friz Freleng angrily leaped to his feet in the Academy screening room and accused MGM of stealing his cartoon.

Thankfully, the last time the Awards had to endure any kind of unpleasantness.

The plot goes thus: a well known cartoon character, dressed in evening wear, enters the stage of a packed auditorium. He begins to play Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2 but runs afoul of and is eventually upstaged by a mischievous mouse who lives in the piano.

That’s right “plot”. Singular. Two cartoons, the exact same scenario, down to the music played in each cartoon and with similar (if not outright identical) gags in both cartoons. The similarities were so immediately obvious that accusations of plagiarism began flying in the screening room and have never stopped flying since. But what actually happened?

Scenario 1: Rhapsody Rabbit ripped off Cat Concerto

This scenario has always felt more right to me, even though it actually has the least amount of evidence. As Joesph Barbera (the co-director of The Cat Concerto) famously mused; “what’s a rabbit doing with a mouse, anyway?”

And yeah, The Cat Concerto is definitely more “on-brand” for Tom and Jerry than Rhapsody Rabbit is for Bugs Bunny. Then there’s the simple fact that if one of these cartoons is rank plagiarism, you’d expect it to be worse than the original, right? Especially in animation. A legitimate animation studio releases something with real craft and effort behind and then someone comes along and does this:

Plagiarism is supposed to be a tool for lazy hacks who don’t want to put the work in. Right? And if you accept that, then things do look pretty bad for Rhapsody Rabbit . Not because RR is bad, but in my opinion, it’s pretty clearly inferior to The Cat Concerto. Putting aside the oddly out of character behaviour of Bugs, it wouldn’t make my list of top 20 Bugs Bunny cartoons, whereas The Cat Concerto is a serious contender for best Tom and Jerry short of all time. The animation in CC is more fluid and, most tellingly, Tom is actually playing the Hungarian Rhapsody. Whereas Bugs is just playing musical gibberish. The Cat Concerto just looks like it had more time, money and craft put into it.

And the Academy agreed with that assessment. The Cat Concerto went on to win Best Animated Short in 1947. Rhapsody Rabbit failed to earn a nomination.

Scenario 2: Cat Concerto ripped off Rhapsody Rabbit

So if you’ve ever watched CSI we’re at about the mid-way point where the most likely suspect drops some new bombshells that completely flips everything on its head.

Firstly, Rhapsody Rabbit is actually a sequel. Sort of. Back in 1941 Friz Freleng directed Rhapsody in Rivets, a cartoon featuring a cast of animal construction workers building a skyscraper to the tune of, you guessed it, Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2. Smoking gun! How can Friz Freling have ripped off The Cat Concerto if Rhapsody Rabbit was always intended to be a sequel to his own cartoon? Ah! But but but! Rhapsody in Rivets is suspiciously like A Car-Tune Portrait which was a 1937 cartoon by Fleischer studios and featured an animal orchestra playing, what else, Franz Goddamned Liszt’s Hungarian Motherfucking Rhapsody Number 2 which possibly means that Friz Freleng had priors and ripped off not one but two cartoons featuring that piece…

“And we haven’t even gotten to Shura Cherkassky yet!”

Goddamn do you see why it took me ten years to tackle this? You just fall down a rabbit hole (or maybe it’s a cat hole?!)

Okay, let’s cut through the bullshit and speculation and talk solid facts.

Thad Komorowski, who did a fantastic deep dive on the controversy over at cartoonreasearch.com, has written that recording records from the time show that the music for Rhapsody Rabbit was recorded by pianist Jakob Gimpel on 02 February 1946, whereas the music for The Cat Concerto was recorded in April of that same year (as the music was such an integral part of both cartoons, the respective studios took the unusual step of recording the music before the animation was produced). So…case closed, right? Rhapsody Rabbit‘s music was recorded two months before The Cat Concerto‘s, ergo Rhapsody Rabbit was in production first and therefore can’t be a rip-off of The Cat Concerto without some kind of time machine, right?

Well, probably. I suppose it’s technically possible that MGM came up with the idea first but that Warner Bros found out and rushed production on Rhapsody Rabbit but that’s all they would have been ripping off. An idea. Plagiarism pretty much depends on there being an existing work to rip-off, not just a vague concept.

But what about the general…offness of Rabbit Rhapsody? Doesn’t it just make more sense that the original idea was for a Tom and Jerry cartoon? Well, it’s actually not that out of character. A lot of the objections people have to Bugs’ behaviour in this short (that Bugs is the aggressor and that he loses to the mouse) can be explained that this is a pre-Chuck Jones short. It was Jones who instituted the famous “winners and losers” hierarchy, and who established that Bugs should only commit violence in self-defence. Bugs in the forties didn’t usually lose, but there were definitely shorts where he did. And also, he was kind of an asshole. Komorowski also makes the point that The Cat Concerto also represents a big formula break for Tom and Jerry. Prior to this short Tom was just a barely anthropomorphised house cat, and suddenly he’s playing Carnegie Hall?

Pretty impressive for someone who was licking his own balls last week.

Scenario 3: The Shura Cherkassky Connection (MGM ripped off Warners, unwittingly)

The Shura Cherkassky Connection is not, as you might expect, an airport thriller by Robert Ludlum but a theory that was floated by Peter Gimpel in 2005. Gimpel is the son of Jakob Gimpel, the composer who anonymously provided the piano performance for Rabbit Rhapsody. Gimpel fils claimed that, having listened to the piano performance of The Cat Concerto, he believed he could identify the pianist as Shura Cherkassky, an extremely well regarded Ukrainian-American pianist who was friends with Jakob Gimpel. Peter Gimpel suggests that Cherkassky, who was something of a prankster and an odd duck, may have learned of Jakob’s gig providing the score for Rabbit Rhapsody and then took the idea to MGM, more or less for a larf. MGM then hired Shura to provide the score for The Cat Concerto, entirely unaware that Warner Bros were already working on a very similar cartoon.

However, Komorowski claims that there’s a pretty big flaw in that theory: Shura Cherkassky was not the pianist for The Cat Concerto.

According to Komorowski, the recording studio records show that CC pianist was Calvin Jackson, not Cherkassky. Dead end.

Scenario 4: Just a Massive Goddamned Coincidence

And so we come to the last possibility, paradoxically the most seemingly far-fetched and the most likely. Could it really happen? Could two studios produce two such similar cartoons in the same relatively short period of time? Well, I think that’s a misleading way of looking at it.

If anything, it was more likely to happen within a short period of time. First, assume that neither party had any interest in plagiarising the other. If there was a longer gap between the release of the two cartoons, it would have made it far more likely for, for example, MGM to see Rhapsody Rabbit and then not make The Cat Concerto because it would seem like obvious plagiarism. In order for the mere coincidence theory to work, both cartoons would have to be in production at the same time and neither studio be aware of the other’s work until it was too late.

And, indeed, we have evidence that that’s what happened. The two cartoons were so similar that Technicolour accidentally sent early footage of Rhapsody Rabbit to MGM. Now, Warner Brothers would later claim that it was this mistake that allowed MGM to copy Rabbit Rhapsody. But Joe Adamson’s book; Bugs Bunny: Fifty Years and Only One Grey Hare claims pretty much the exact opposite:

“Tex Avery was a witness when the folks at Technicolor, evidently stressed out, delivered one day’s Rhapsody Rabbit footage by mistake to the MGM cartoon unit, apparently confusing it with a disturbingly similar Tom & Jerry cartoon, on which Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were then pinning their Academy Award hopes for 1947. When Bugs Bunny came up on the MGM screen, it was Hanna and Barbera who were disturbed first: a project much like theirs was apparently closer to completion over at Termite Terrace, and it was clearly going to be an Oscar contender for 1946.“

So, according to Tex Avery, MGM were already working on The Cat Concerto, and were so freaked out that Warner’s were apparently making the same damn cartoon that they put the pedal to the metal to get theirs out of the gate first.

Likewise, it seems Warners may also have been aware of the impending clash as (again, according to Komorowski) they shuffled their release schedule to screen Rabbit Rhapsody earlier than they originally intended.

Is it possible that it was just a coincidence? Yes. Here’s how I know.

In my second year of college I was commissioned by the university drama society to write a play to be performed by the newer members of the society. And I wrote a little comedic one act play called “A Play for Bad Actors” which was about a production of an Agatha Christie style murder mystery play that’s been cursed and where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. And since then, on three separate occasions, people have contacted me to tell me that somebody stole my play.

And I get why they think that. It’s a play about an Agatha Christie style murder mystery play where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. And indeed, often the very same things go wrong as go wrong in my play. It’s quite eerie, honestly. But I know for a fact that, no, Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields did not steal my play that was seen by at most a hundred people and then proceed to win a Laurence Olivier Award with it. We just had the same basic idea, a pastiche of The Mousetrap, which is the theatrical equivalent of doing a movie making fun of Star Wars. It’s not that original. And once you have the same basic idea, a play going wrong, a lot of the same jokes are going to naturally suggest themselves. Oh no, this actor got their line wrong, oh no, this prop didn’t work etc.

And, by the same token, it’s actually not at all shocking that there were two cartoons in the same year that featured Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2 because I’ve already mentioned two other cartoons that also used that piece of music and, trust me, that’s only scratching the surface. Hell, here’s a Micky Mouse cartoon from all the way back in 1929 that features Mickey playing the piece on a piano.

Here’s Woody Woodpecker in 1954.

Hell. Here’s a SEVEN AND A HALF minute compilation cartoons using this piece of music:

So no, the fact that they both used this piece of music isn’t THAT big a coincidence. And likewise, the fact that both cartoons feature their main characters sitting at a piano and playing isn’t that big a coincidence either. What else are they going to be playing, the theremin?

And once you accept that that’s not such a big coincidence, the similarities suddenly seem less jarring. Because, let’s face it, the two cartoons are hardly carbon copies of each other. Tom doesn’t play his piano like a type writer. Bugs doesn’t get his fingers flattened by the piano lid. There are similar jokes, certainly, but that can just be explained by the fact that they’re riffing off the same piece of music which lends itself to the same gags.

But ultimately, it comes down to a complete lack of motive. What was the result of the controversy? Suspicion and accusations of plagiarism that persist to this day and tarnished both MGM and Warner Bros.

What was the benefit? Sure, MGM got an Oscar for Cat Concerto, but that was luck of the draw. If Rabbit Rhapsody had been shown before Cat Concerto, the Academy voters might well have deemed their cartoon to be the rip off instead. More to the point do you really think Friz Freleng suddenly ran out of ideas and needed to steal one? Do you really think William Hanna or Joseph Barbera decided to just half ass things and copy whatever was popular at the time?

In the forties, I mean? Before they just gave up?

These men weren’t hacks (in the forties). These were three of the greatest names in the history of short form animation (in the forties).

Sometimes, great minds really do just think alike.

Pain bad Mouse no Mouse

“Follow me, and I will be thy guide,
And lead thee hence through the eternal place,
Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations,
Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate,
Who cry out each one for the second death…”“Hold up Virgil, who’s that?”“OH GAWD IT HURTS SO BAAAAAAD!”“Oh, that’s the Unshaved Mouse, he got a tooth extracted and the painkillers ain’t doing shit, poor bastard.”“But look down here, everyone who was ever mean to you is suffering eternally!”
“Neat!”

Greetings traveller and welcome to my Stygian abyss of eternal suffering where I endure agonies that no one could possibly understand.

“I pushed two whole humans out of my funzone for you.”

MY POINT IS I was planning on posting a review on Alice in Wonderland 2010 this week but since the tooth I had removed was apparently the special magical tooth that stops me feeling pain all the time, I will have to delay sharing that movie with you. Which is monstrously unfair, because why should I be the only one to suffer?

Anyway instead of that, please enjoy this post I was saving for the ten year anniversary of the blog next month, a look at one of the most fascinating controversies in the history of animation; Rabbit Rhapsody and The Cat Concerto.

Keep me in your prayers, that I may someday be delivered to the light.

“Hey, why is everyone in Hell Italian, anyway?”

Live Action Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse: Cinderella

“Hey Mouse, what do you think about all these live action Disney remakes?” is a question I have never been asked because I am a relic of the 2010s internet and have been irrelevant to fandom discourse for quite some time.

But if they did ask for those opinions, boy, do I have opinions! Nuanced and interesting opinions? Not really, by and large I think they’re hot garbage at best and actually morally reprehensible at worst.

“Hey, when are you going to review me?”“Fine. Nice costumes. Tangentially complicit in genocide. No stars.”

I hate the whole scene, man. I hate the lazy nostalgia milking. I hate the rehashing of old songs and characters in ways that are always inferior to the originals (the 2016 Jungle Book is, I admit, a pretty fine movie but I’ll be deep in the cold ground before I say it’s an improvement on the ’67 cartoon.). I am real sick of Disney cynically trumpeting minor gay characters whose presence would have been real daring thirty years ago to earn gushing publicity. And I really hate that the biggest entertainment company in Western history is apparently unable to understand the simple fact that just because a character is a great villain doesn’t make them a great protagonist. In fact, it means the opposite of that.

AHEM.

That said…I’ll admit the announcement of 2015s Cinderella provoked a lot less bile and profanity to gush forth than it usually would. Mostly that’s a lack of skin in the game. The 1950 Cinderella is a film with which I am on perfectly cordial terms, but it’s not and never will be as important to me as something like The Little Mermaid or The Lion King. Plus…it’s Cinderella, you know? The Disney Cinderella may be the most famous film version but it’s certainly not the definitive version, because there isn’t one and never will be. Cinderella is one of the absolute pillars of world folklore, with versions spanning thousands of years across the breadth of Europe and Asia. And there have been Cinderella movies as long as there has been film. The earliest version I found was from 1913 (called, hilariously “A Modern Cinderella”). Cinderella has been played by everyone from Julie Andrews to Brandy to Betty Boop to Jerry Lewis. It’s a timeless story that’s remained popular despite decades of bad, pseudo-feminist critique (the story is not, and never has been, about marrying a prince. It is, and always has been, about escaping poverty and domestic slavery). So, whatever, I say. Disney want to make another Cinderella movie? Fine.

I am willing to acknowledge this movie’s right to exist, Disney. All you gotta do is make a good movie.

“OH SHIT!”

Here’s a question. How much narration does a movie about Cinderella need? I would argue very, very little, if any. True, most versions of the story will be aimed at young children so it might not hurt to have a little soothing voiceover at the beginning to set the scene. But the amount of wittering that the Fairy Godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) does throughout this joint leaves me with the inescapable conclusion that either the screenwriter or the director did not trust the audience to follow the plot of Cinderella. Why would you think that, Kenneth Branagh?

“Because you paid to watch this, you schmuck.”“Touché.”

So the movie introduces our heroine as a baby and is at pains to tell us that she had “no rank, no title, no crown”. It then pans away to show us the palatial rural mansion where Cinderella lives with her father and mother.

“A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be”

Little Ella is sweet and kind and ever so wonderful and her mother teaches her to look after all animals just as fairy godmothers look after human beings. Ella asks her mother if she believes in fairy godmothers and she replies that she believes in everything. Which…that’s a fucking terrifying thing to hear anybody say.

“You name it I believe it! Vaccines turn you into a lizard! The moon’s a hologram! BUY NFTs!”

By the way, Hayley Atwell’s bleached eyebrows will haunt me to my dying day, so there’s that. So, during a fairly long and heavily narrated sequence that could have been done in half the time with twice the impact with a wordless montage, Ella’a mother comes down with a terminal case of Disneymomitis and kicks the bucket, pausing only to tell her darling daughter to have courage and be kind and probably something about Freemasons.

Flash-forward a few years and Ella has grown into Lily James and her father tells her that he’s fallen for the lovely widow of Lord Francis Tremaine.

“Ooooooooh.”

Anyone remember that Robin Hood movie from back in 2010? I remember a great line from a review about Cate Blanchett’s performance as Maid Marian: “She looks like a Master Carpenter who’s been asked to assemble an IKEA table”. Let me not mince words. This movie is bland as all hell. It’s not terrible, but it’s so depressingly rote and minimum effort competence that it almost feels like it’s terrible. But there are moments when you see the much better movie that this could have been and I do not think it a coincidence that virtually all those moments involve Madame Blanchett. The scene where Lady Tremaine first arrives at the manor, her face covered with a great black hat that resembles the snout of a shark is excellently done.

You really get the sense of a predator entering a completely defenceless space. Everything about this scene, the staging, the lighting, the cinematography and of course the presence of Blanchett herself is leagues ahead of the movie surrounding it.

Anyway, Ella meets her new stepmother and we get a really nice exchange that sums up Lady Tremaine’s character perfectly.

TREMAINE: You did not tell me your daughter was so beautiful!

ELLA’S FATHER: Oh, she takes after her…

LADY TREMAINE. Her mother. (icy pause) Just so.

And it’s not the terrifying smile that makes it work. It’s not the hatred in her eyes before she throws up the mask. It’s the hurt. It’s the knowledge that she will always be second best to this man that you see just for a moment. It is phenomenal acting. First rate. By GOD I wish it was in a better movie.

Having unwittingly made a blood enemy for life, Ella also meets her Conventionally Attractive Step Sisters because they are ALWAYS Conventionally Attractive Step Sisters. I don’t think there have ever been actually Ugly Step Sisters in a live action Cinderella Movie (I imagine it’s a difficult role to cast).

Ella’s father goes away on a business trip and Lady Tremaine manipulates her into giving up her room and moving into the attic. And, because her mother taught her to always be kind, she just goes along with it.

Now, here’s a question. What does a modern audience want from a Cinderella movie? Now, speaking for myself, I know what I don’t want. I don’t want Cinderella re-imagined as some kind of asskicking girlboss because, y’know, the story doesn’t happen. It’s not Cinderella anymore. And, I’ll admit, in this era of constant re-imaginings, re-inventions and re-bootings there is something very appealing about a movie that says; “We’re doing a classic Cinderella movie. That’s it. That’s the pitch.” All well and good.

But, because an hour-and-three-quarters live action film is supposed to have more character development than a 74 minute cartoon, they obviously were going to have to deepen the character of Cinderella and what they went with is frankly weird and a little worrying. Now, I’m not going to claim that Cinderella 1950 is some kind of radical feminist masterpiece (that’s the other one) but Cinderella in that movie is not the smiling doormat she’s often painted as. I always took her as more of a quiet, resilient soul who knew she was in an awful situation but found her joy where she could and refused to let her spirit be crushed. And yeah, it’s not the most dynamic character but I think there is a kind of heroism in that. Cinderella 2015 though…is kind of heart-breaking. Because she’s smiling and singing as she’s slowly turned into a domestic slave by Lady Tremaine because her darling mother basically told her to always just smile and do whatever she can to make other people happy. To the point that she seems less stoic and patient and more…unhinged. And yeah, I guess I am saying that Cinderella 1950 has more agency than a movie made in the second decade of the 21st century. And you may do with that information what you will.

Ella’s father dies on the way back to his home planet, and so the family are thrown into near financial ruin.

Truly, the most unflinching depiction of poverty onscreen since Nil By Mouth.

To cut costs, Lady Tremaine fires the servants and replaces them with Ella. When it’s cold, Ella sleeps in the cinders of the fire, which leads to the following dialogue.

DRUSILLA: I’ve got a knew name for her! Cinder-wench!

ANASTASIA: Oh! “Dirty-ella”!

DRUSILLA: Cinderella!

Distraught, Ella saddles a horse and rides off into the forest where she encounters a stag, who she helps escape from some hunters. We get another example of the movie’s addiction to superflous narration as the fairy godmother solemnly opines that “perhaps it was fortunate that Ella’s sister’s were so cruel, for if she had not run into the forest, she would not have met the prince”. Which firstly, yikes. And secondly, exactly what information is being imparted here? We know we she ran into the forest, we just saw it. And we know this guy is the Prince because who the fuck else is it going to be, Sebastian the crab?

Anyway, “Kit” is played by Richard Madden who, unbeknownst to Ella, is actually the Prince. Cate Blanchett may be the best thing in this movie, but Madden is actually the one element that I’d actually consider an improvement on the original. Granted, that’s not saying much. The Original Prince Charming is the blandest of all the bland Disney princes and it’s not even close. But Madden’s cut a niche for himself giving depth and gravitas to “generic handsome dude #1” and I do genuinely like his work here. Anyway, his heart is immediately one by her simple peasant girl purity and he returns home to the palace to tell his father the King, played by Derek Jacobi. Jacobi, like Blanchett, is also assembling IKEA furniture with the hand of a master but, dammit, there’s only one Otto Von Bismarck.

“They say, Otto, you do the remake? I say “I want cut of toy sales” they say “no”, I tell them “go to hell” ja?

Anyway, the King this go round has been diagnosed with Disneydaditis and wants to see his son matched up and pumping out heirs before he goes to the big burger restaurant in the sky. To that end, he commissions a portrait of his son to be sent to all the marriageable princesses of Europe who will be invited to a ball. Kit asks why he can’t just marry a simple country girl and the Grand Duke (Stellan Skarsgard, dutifully assembling a Hurdal) asks how many divisions such a country girl would bring to help secure the nation. That’s right children, this monster has an understanding of royal marriage in the medieval period based in logic and the politics of the time!

“BOOOOOO!!! HISS!!”

As a compromise, Kit agrees to the ball on the condition that everyone in the kingdom is also invited. And I’ll give credit for a nice little piece of characterisation here; the Duke doesn’t splutter indignantly at the idea of commoners coming to the palace. His reaction is “awesome, great PR move, everyone’s happy, let’s do it”. It makes him come across as a more nuanced and pragmatic villain, I dig it.

So, guess who I haven’t mentioned at all yet? The mice. You know, the characters who get probably more screentime in the original movie than any other character barring Cinderella herself?

Yeah, these little assholes.

So you might assume that this means that they’re not in Cinderella 2015. Well no, they are, but their parts and role in the story have been trimmed down to basically nothing and that (in my opinion) ends up hurting the movie in quite a big way. Gather around children, and I will demonstrate how one seemingly minor change can weaken your story dramatically.

Now, I never really liked the mice in the original movie. In fact, as a rodent, I find the portrayal deeply offensive. But, let me refresh your memory on one point. The Tremaine ladies are informed of the ball and Cinderella insists that she be allowed to go too. Lady Tremaine agrees that she can go, as long as she completes her chores, and then ensures she is worked so hard that she has no time to prepare her dress. But then, exhausted and dejected, she goes upstairs to the attic and sees this:

So suddenly she goes from weary resignation to euphoric joy. In gratitude for her kindness to them, her friends have worked through the night to ensure that yes, she shall go to the ball. Yes, she shall have one damn night of happiness. Yes, for once, she gets to win. So when you go from that euphoric height to THIS:

The cruelty and the unfairness of it hits so much harder. And when we finally end up HERE:

It feels earned and then some. By contrast, 2015 Cinderella never has that moment of reversal and euphoria. She just makes the dress herself, with a little help from the mice. I guess they were concerned that the mice making the dress for her makes Cinderella seem passive but I would have kept it unchanged. Anyway, Tremaine and the step-sister tear her dress a little (it is so tame compared to the original) and flounce off to the ball. Distraught, Cinderella runs outside into the garden where she meets Sheev Palpatine, Galactic Emperor and Dark Lord of the Sith.

“Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.”

Palpatine asks her for some milk and Cinderella of course, gets some, which causes Palpatine to transform into the Fairy Godmother (Helena Bonham Carter). Okay you know the drill; Pumpkin, Coach, Lizards, Footmen, Mice, Horses, Glass Slipper, you shall go to the ball. We don’t get “Bippity boppity boo” but we do get awful rubbery CGI so who’s the great movie-maker now, Walt?

“If you people pissed on my grave any more my coffin would be floating downriver right now.”

Cinderella arrives at the place and confides to one of the lizard footmen that she’s nervous and he replies something on the lines of “I’m a lizard forced into a human body struggling to cope with thoughts and emotions literally too alien and advanced for me to comprehend, fucking suck it up”. Here the movie makes the classic mistake of introducing a minor character far, far more interesting and compelling than the protagonist.

FOOTMAN: A Lizard’s Tale.

At the ball, Cinderella meets up with Kit and is shocked to learn that he is actually the Prince. He assumes that she’s actually a Princess because she has a beautiful dress and all her teeth and she notably does not correct him which is shady as fuck. The clock strikes 12 and Cinderella has to amscray out of there but she leaves her…sigh…glass slipper behind…you know all this, WHY AM I RECAPPING THE BEST KNOWN STORY IN THE OLD WORLD?

Okay, let’s talk about something new. Cinderella arrives home and hides her one glass slipper under the floorboards of the attic. But Lady Tremaine realises that she was the mysterious princess and finds the slipper. We now get a monologue that is one of the better pieces of writing in the script, and which Cate Blanchett just knocks out of the park, showing us how Lady Tremaine sees herself as the tragic, perpetually wronged heroine of her own story. Lady Tremaine now offers Cinderella a deal; she will support her in her efforts to marry the Prince as long as she (Tremaine) gets a position in the royal court and good marriages for her daughters. Cinderella refuses, rather stupidly if you ask me. And Tremaine smashes the slipper.

Now, I have talked a lot of trash about this movie but this is genuinely good stuff. The movie banks on your familiarity with the original and knows that you know that that movies is resolved with…

“You see, I have the other slipper.”

By talking the second slipper off the board early, the movie creates tension. How is Cinderella going to get out of this?

Very easily, as it will turn out, but that’s not the point.

Another strong scene, Tremaine travels to the palace to confide in the Duke and succeeds in negotiating a title for herself and marriages to eligible men for her daughters in exchange for her silence on the matter of the Prince falling in love with a filthy peasant girl. Really nice little bit of dialogue here:

: You’ve spared the kingdom a great deal of embarrassment.

: And I should like to keep it that way.

: Are you threatening me?

: (with just the sweetest smile) Yes.

And the Duke’s reaction is just to laugh gently at how well she’s playing the game.

Kit is now King after his father passes on, and commands that every woman in the kingdom try on the slipper so that he can find Cinderella. Tremaine locks Cinderella in the attic while the step-sisters try and fail to put the slipper on and Disney once again omit the part where they cut their feet in half to make them fit because apparently that’s “awful” and “traumatising”. Pff. Oh, what happened to the studio that shot Bambi’s mother in front of us and licked the very tears from our faces? You ruin everything, millennials.

Anyway, just as the Duke and the Captain are leaving, the mice open the window to the attic which allows everyone to Cinderella singing the old English lullaby Lavenders Blue. Fun fact, this is actually the second Disney movie to use this particular song after So Dear to My Heart all the way back in 1948. And I will concede, Lily James has a beautiful singing voice. The Captain wants to investigate but the Duke is all, nah, it’s just the pipes singing wistful lovelorn dirges and then one of the soldiers takes off his hat and , oh shit look who it is…

He puts the “king” in “sneaking”.

The King orders this mysterious maiden to be brought forth and brought forth she be. They recognise each other and leave arm in arm. Cinderella stops only to tell her step-mother that she forgives her. However, the narrator is quick to tell us that “Forgiven or not, Cinderella’s stepmother and her daughters would soon leave with the Grand Duke, and never set foot in the kingdom again” which…yeah, that’s code for “they were all fucking hanged” and you can’t convince me otherwise.

And they all, as the saying goes, lived happily ever after.

***

There have definitely been worse atrocities committed by Disney against their own properties. It’s not the worst live action remake, but for the most part it’s just rote, safe and competent. I can’t imagine this being anyone’s favourite version of this story, but it’s harmless enough I suppose.

Ways this improves on the original: This is a tricky one. Cate Blanchett is giving a wonderful, very compelling performance as Lady Tremaine. But can that really be said to be better than the glorious original design and Eleanor Audley’s iconic vocal turn? Let’s just say they’re both wonderful in different ways. Skarsgard is playing a completely different character to the original hapless Duke but I do like him a lot. Richard Madden doesn’t have to work particularly hard to improve on the bland cipher that was the Prince in the original movie but he does do it, so points there.

Ways it doesn’t: Cinderella herself, I’m afraid. The quiet, kind-hearted, ordinary girl of the original is here some kind of avatar of saccharine sweetness who genuinely can’t understand the concept of people not being nice. Pop culture’s parody idea of a Disney Princess played perfectly straight. Also, some butt ugly CGI here.

How angry did this movie make me?: Not angry. Mostly bored.

SCORE: I’m going to take the original’s score of 57% (man, I was harsh back before I’d seen real shit) and subtract…let’s see. 8%.

FINAL SCORE: 49%

NEXT UPDATE: 28 July 2022

NEXT TIME: We’re all mad here. In the sense of being “furiously angry”.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

In the season 6 Simpsons episode Lisa’s Wedding, we get a glimpse of the far-flung future of 2010. We see Lisa Simpson and her boyfriend Hugh exiting a film festival dedicated to Jim Carrey. “He can make you laugh with a mere flailing of his limbs” Lisa gushes wistfully.

From the perspective of 1995 the joke is simple enough; wouldn’t it be funny if low-brow, gurning over-actor Jim Carrey was one day revered as a Carey Grant-esque screen icon? Well, it’s a neat dozen years after the “future” the Simpsons predicted and, while I wouldn’t say he’s quite there yet, Jim Carrey is definitely a much more highly respected performer than when the Simpsons made their jab. Like the Simpsons, Jim Carrey is still around. Unlike the Simpsons, he’s still approaching everything with maximum enthusiasm and can still manage to be funny so I say, match point Carrey.

That’s a subjective view, obviously. Carrey is very much a marmite performer, you either love him or you hate him. Personally, I’m just the right age where Ace Ventura, Batman Forever and The Mask were childhood staples so yeah I dig the dude a lot. For me, he’s in that rarified “Jack Nicholson” category; there’s is no one else who can do what he does and he clearly has a ball doing it. But sure, he’s not everyone’s bag. Fans of Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (which, paws in the air, I have yet to read) seem deeply divided on Carrey’s portrayal of the villain Count Olaf, who is (apparently) a far less comedic and more monstrous individual in the books. Sucks to be them. I think this is his best work in anything not called The Truman Show. Look, casting Jim Carrey and expecting him not to be Jim Carrey is like hiring a bouncy castle and then just putting it your front garden for children to look at.

That is, something only a monster would do.

The movie begins with a happy little animated sequence about a happy little elf before abruptly grinding to a halt and Lemony Snicket (Jude Law, god damn) solemnly informing us that this ain’t that kinda movie, fam.

What it is, by the by, is bloody smurges:

The movie’s cinematography was done by Emmanuel Lubezki. He’s the only person in history to win three consecutive Academy awards for cinematography which is proof that even the Academy gets things right sometimes. He worked with Tim Burton on Sleepy Hollow, the movie that this film most reminds me of and it’s an aesthetic that I don’t think I will ever get tired of. It’s just..so…depressingly beautiful. Then there’s the maudlin lullaby of the movie’s soundtrack by Thomas Newman which combines with the visuals to ensure that this film has atmosphere to burn.

Anyway our story begins with the Baudelaire children Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken) and Sunny (Klara and Shelby Hoffman) being visited on a bleak and forbidding beach by their family banker Mr Poe, played by Timothy Spall (God damn). He tells the children that their parents have burned to death in a most unfortunate event, which is awful, but will hopefully be the last one they have to endure.

Ah. Never mind.

Mr Poe turns out to be a clueless idiot (despite working in the banking industry) and interprets the Baudelaires’ will that their children be placed in the care of their closest relative to be geographically closest and so leaves them with their distant cousin Count Olaf. Pretty shoddy, but then again, it could easily have been avoided if the Baudelaire’s had, oh I dunno, JUST SPECIFIED THEIR CHILDREN’S GUARDIAN BY NAME IN THE WILL but whatever. On their way to Count Olaf’s house, they meet the lovely Justice Strauss (Catherine O’Hara, God damn) who the children briefly believe is Olaf’s wife before she has to tell them that no, she’s just his neighbour and they’re on their own.

Olaf is an evil and shiftless aristocrat, but I repeat myself, and a morally degenerate actor (ditto) who wastes no time putting the Baudelaire orphans to work as servants in his crumbling, decaying Addams Family mansion. Things come to a head when the children are forced to cook a meal for the count’s acting troop with half an hours notice while the actors rehearse. This, incidentally, gives Jim Carrey an opportunity to give us the finest portrayal of a dinosaur ever seen on the big screen.

Eat shit, Spielberg.

When he realises that the children have not cooked a roast beef dinner like he wanted, Olaf hits Klaus. Furious, Violet tells him that she’s going to call Mr Poe so, he drives the children to a railway line and traps them in the car to be crushed by an oncoming train.

However, the Baudelaire’s are no ordinary orphans and through Violet’s inventive prowess, Klaus’s encyclopaedic knowledge of facts and Sunny’s razor-sharp little rat-like toddler teeth (most accurate part of the movie), they’re able to escape. Mr Poe, arrives and completely misses the point that Olaf was trying to kill the children, but thinks that Olaf was letting them drive the car and so takes them away to live with another guardian.

This turns out to be their Uncle Montgomery (Billy Connolly, God damn) a kindly herpetologist which is actually someone who studies snakes and not what I thought it was. (Don’t show a herpetologist your ass. I learned that the hard way.)

Uncle Monty tells the children that they’re all going to South America, where they’ll be safe from Count Olaf. The children quickly grow to love their kind, compassionate new guardian which means of course that Monty’s going to bite the big one.

Olaf shows up disguised as “Stefano”, another herpetologist ostensibly here to help Monty move his snakes. The next morning, Monty is found dead, apparently killed by the Incredibly Deadly Viper, a species of snake Monty discovered. Mr Poe and the police almost place the orphans in Stefano’s care but Sunny proves that the snake is actually harmless, and that “Incredibly Deadly Viper” is a deliberate misnomer like “Killer Whale” or “African Elephant”.

They’re actually native to Croydon.

Mr Poe, who by this point should have failed upwards enough to be put in charge of the entire banking sector, takes the children to the next relative on their list, Aunt Josephine played by Meryl Streep (HOLY SHIT!!).

God DAMN this cast is stacked. Anyway, you can probably guess the formula by now. Funny eccentric relative is funny and eccentric, Olaf turns up in a new disguise which no one can see through, kills said relative and the children barely escape through their own quick-wittedness and with absolutely no help from the adults and institutions that should be protecting them. So it goes, Olaf feeds Aunt Josephine to the “lachrymose leeches” after she corrects his grammar and pretends to be rescuing the children just as Mr Poe and the police arrive which (of course) results in them being put back in his tender care.

Olaf now has a new plan to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune which is to stage a play where he will marry Violet onstage, with the justice being played by Justice Strauss who (as an actual justice) will actually legally marry them.

That is EXACTLY how Keanu Reeves got his hands on the legendary Ryder fortune.

To avoid Justice Strauss talking to the children and learning the truth about the plot, Olaf keeps her nauseous by telling her that there is a theatre critic in the audience, who is played by OH COME ON!

Now you’re just showing off, movie.

Anyway, Klaus Baudelaire is able to save his sister from her underage marriage by discovering a tower room with lenses that he realises Olaf was able to use to set the Baudelaire’s mansion on fire. Re-focusing the lenses, he is able to burn the marriage certificate, ruining Olaf’s plan. The audience, FINALLY realising that Olaf is a bastard, seize him and he’s put on trial. Where he walks away scott-free because he stacked the jury because of course he did.

While visiting the charred remains of their home, the Baudelaires find a letter from their parents telling them that they love them and entrusting them with a spyglass that has “sequel hook” written all over it.

And the movie ends with the three orphans being driven away to meet their next guardian who I’m sure will be lovely.

Cigar’s always a good sign, right?

***

LMASOUE is exactly the kind of film that really challenges me to review it.

Is it good, Mouse?

Yes, reader. It is, in fact, very good indeed.

Why is it so good, Mouse?

Well because the cinematography, score and direction are all excellent, the script is witty and literate and the cast is absolutely fucking STACKED with some of the best actors of the period giving game performances.

Huh, well when you put it that way it’s seems pretty obvious.

I know, right? Explaining why this movie is good is kinda like having to explain why water is wet.

It just is.

Five stars.

One whole star for this hat.

PS: I haven’t watched the Netflix series fully myself, Mini-Mouse has been binging it and I’ve seen snippets (snickets?). Seems fine. Fatally lacking in Jim Carrey impersonating a dinosaur, but fine.

NEXT UPDATE: I’m going on holiday so next update’s going to be a littler later than usual, 14th July.

NEXT TIME: It’s live action Disney remakes month. What’s that? You didn’t ask for this?

No one ever does.