Lost (and Not So Lost) Causes: “Newsies”

 When a musical called Newsies was released by Disneyin 1992, it was a box office bomb. This despite the presence in the cast of asexy Ann-Margret, an earnest Bill Pullman, an oily Robert Duvall (playing newspapertycoon Joseph Pulitzer), and—in a bravura role—a very young and dashing ChristianBale. The story was a good one, drawn from an 1899 strike by New York Citynewsboys furious that the city’s newspaper publishers were trying to bolstertheir own profits by increasing the sum they charged these scruffy street kidsfor the privilege of hawking their papers. Kenny Ortega, well known forchoreographing such popular films as Dirty Dancing, signed on to makehis directing debut. Alan Menken, who contributed memorable tunes to Disneyhits like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, came aboard to writethe score.

 

hat the Disney folks had in mind was a sort ofnineteenth-century West Side Story, with ragtag youngsters expressingtheir social angst by singing and dancing through the streets of Manhattan. Agood idea, perhaps, but in its execution not terribly convincing. Though thestory of the strike is a real one, the production here seems clearly to belongto the backlot of a movie studio. This despite the fact that the dance moves,in particular, are thrilling, especially in a rousing number called “Seize theDay.” (I’m not sure these street urchins would know the English-languagetranslation of the Latin “carpe diem,” but never mind.)  Perhaps this should have been a Broadway showfrom the beginning: when a revised version did open on the Great White Way in2011, it ran for three years, racking up numerous nominations and awards.

 

I caught Newsies on a Disney-issued DVD from 2002,courtesy of my local library. (Public libraries, as I hope everyone knows, area great source of DVDs as well as books.). In the usual manner of DVDs issuedby movie studios, the feature film I watched was preceded by enthusiasticpromos for other movies that were, we were told, coming soon. What caught myattention was that each of the promos preceding Newsies was for a Disneyanimated feature that was a follow-up to a classic Disney hit. I was urged tosee such movies as a Peter Pan sequel, Cinderella 2, and 101Dalmatians II. Every single one of these breathlessly-hyped flicks was, Inoted, apparently hand-drawn, in the traditional Disney way. Nocomputer-generated animation here!

 

Which made it seem that Disney—seven years after Pixardebuted Toy Story, the world’s first fully computer-animated featurefilm—was still trying to deny that the computer had changed animation forever.Clearly, this attempt at denial didn’t work. I doubt any of the sequelspromoted on this DVD made the company much money. Four years later, in 2006,the Disney folks announced that they were buying Pixar, and folding it into theDisney universe, while also experimenting with ways to use computers on theirown in-house projects.

 

Personally, I love the look of hand-drawn animation (thoughI’m hardly opposed to the use of computers to simplify the animator’s job). Buton the Newsies 2002 DVD, Disney seems to be stuck in the past, both interms of technique and subject matter. The contents of the DVD imply thatDisney wants to turn back the clock to a time that once was (or, perhaps, neverreally was). A time when animators drew by hand, and when big splashy musicalsthat aimed to be a cross between West Side Story and Oliver! werebig hits at your local movie house.