Tags: This vs. That
An intriguing question posed to me in another forum: “Who is the worst Disney villain? Mother Gothel in
Tangled is
bad (kidnapping, brainwashing). The evil Queen from
Snow White?”
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Like Dorothy’s house, uprooted in fairy-tale response to her running away, physical domiciles in one family film after another are displaced, torn asunder, and undergo fantastic, traumatic crises and transformations in visionary mirroring of the upheaval in the characters’ lives. Among the more striking examples of this poetic linking of house and household are Jon Favreau’s intriguing 2005 fantasy
Zathura, Gil Kenan’s 2006 Halloween tale
Monster House, Mark Waters’s smart, scary 2008 thriller
The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Pete Docter’s 2009 Pixar fantasy
Up.
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Teens & Up
The upshot is that this new
Footloose is a dumbed-down, sexed-up take on a story that was already risqué and not too bright — one that shies away from the ’84 film’s critique of the church, but is also further from its lingering Christian worldview.
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Over and over we see smart, tough, confident, independent heroines — Astrid in
How to Train Your Dragon; Hermione in the
Harry Potter films; Tigress in
Kung Fu Panda; Eve in
Wall-E; Colette in
Ratatouille; Jewel in
Rio — next to whom the heroes appear variously awkward, diffident, incapable, clueless or ridiculous.
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There’s something instantly appealing about the thought of Spielberg directing Hollywood’s first major live-action take on Moses’ story since Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 crowning achievement,
The Ten Commandments.
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With
Cars 2 approaching this weekend, I thought I’d take a look back at
Cars, easily Pixar’s least impressive and celebrated film since their second picture,
A Bug’s Life.
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I seem to be on a comparison kick: A while back I did a massive comparison/contrast between
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and The Empire Strikes Back. Then I followed up with a comparison/contrast of
Fantasia and Fantasia 2000.
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(Newly available on Blu-ray/DVD) Rather than a static motion picture,
Fantasia was originally conceived as a repertoire, a selection of presentations that over time could be augmented by new pieces while old ones were retired, like an orchestra rotating its concert lineup … Ten years ago, amid the wreckage at the end of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, the Disney studio marked
Fantasia’s 60th anniversary with
Fantasia 2000, a film intended to honor in a way the original repertory conception of
Fantasia.
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12 reasons why
Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is no
Empire Strikes Back … or even
The Two Towers.
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Props to reader Victor for highlighting this
infographic from a few years back analyzing the differences between the creative processes at Pixar and DreamWorks.
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Adults*
There’s no spiritual duel, no earned respect and debt of honor. There is just a broken man and a capricious one: one harboring hopeless dreams of being a man again in the eyes of his wife and son but no hope of achieving it; the other larger than life, an implacable force of nature able to kill men and seduce women essentially at will, and who never has any reason to honor or respect the other man, but could conceivably take pity on him and go along with him, if it strikes his fancy.
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The hero’s nearly religious reverence for rock’s angry
posturing and anti-authoritarianism — reverence culminating in a
pre-concert prayer to the "God of rock" — isn’t quite condoned,
but isn’t put in any larger context either. Rock culture’s darker
side is whitewashed (it’s not about drugs, kids, and groupies are
really just band cheerleaders!), and subjects other than music
(and even music other than rock) get short shrift. Then there’s
the swishing, lisping fifth-grade "band stylist" bringing "Queer
Eye" camp to the grade-school setting.
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What, then, defines morally acceptable use of good magic in fiction? Where, and how, do we draw the line? How do we distinguish the truly worthwhile (Tolkien and Lewis), the basically harmless (Glinda, Cinderella’s fairy godmother), and the problematic or objectionable (“Buffy,”
The Craft)? And where on this continuum does Harry Potter really fall?
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