The Land Before Time (Sullivan Bluth, 1988)

DINOSAURS!

Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaaaaaurs

That was me in 1988. A four year old boy into dinosaurs? I know, how original. But I fancy I went a bit further over the years. Anyone can wear a sweatshirt with a dinosaur, but I favored the one from the post office, bearing their stamps, because it was more accurate. I owned a copy of Robert Bakker’s “The Dinosaur Heresies”, even though I could neither define nor pronounce ‘heresies’. I knew what a Dinosauroid was. (and now that I’m older, I know something else a Dinosauroid was: pseudoscience bull malarkey.) I’m amazed I didn’t see this movie at the time, or on video at any point during my long dinosaur fondness. But while my interest might have been scientifically driven, it was far from unique, and after their last success, Spielberg knew what kids wanted to see: Bambi with dinosaurs.

DINOSAURS!

DINOSAURS!

DINOSAAAAAAAURS!

and pterosaurs and icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and mososaurs, which are always classified as dinosaurs even though they aaaaaaactually arent

IT’S THE LAND BEFORE TIME!

So Spielberg and George Lucas supplied the story, and Bluth supplied the film. And boy, is this a Spielberg story. Parental abandonment, innocence of youth, hero’s journey, all that jazz. This is not to say that Bluth’s directorial hand is not felt, which is all the more impressive, given how out of his wheelhouse the setting is. In the two Bluth movies we’ve already reviewed, and the others I’ve seen, I’ve noticed a few quirks he has. He loves to animate people luxuriously smoking, he loves throwing sparkles all over everything, he loves clattering collections of caliginous junk, he loves characters whose skirts fly up to reveal puffy bloomers beneath (this one is really weird and shows up ALL THE TIME). He loves musical numbers. He loves Dom DeLuise.

The Land Before Time contains none of these things - well, one or two errant sparkles - so Bluth’s occasional excesses that have been a surprisingly common irritant are mostly gone. The Bluth tropes that do show up are the ones that integrate easily into a movie. His love of nature scenes and lush, detailed backgrounds. His emphasis on character interactions over plot details, occasionally leading to a bit of contrivance.

This is most of the movie.

 This is not to say that the plot is bad, just unimportant. For the second time on this blog, I’m critiquing a movie about dinosaurs trekking through a bit of a wasteland looking for a fertile area. And while this one came first, it’s not a whole lot more interesting. It’s definitely better, though. For one thing, there’s no annoying lemurs hanging around the place. The characters are a lot better drawn, too, and if they’re a little broad, it’s easier to forgive in child characters. Littlefoot is driven, Cera’s a jerk, Spike’s an idiot, Ducky is eager, and Petrie is nervous. And that’s all we need, because the journey is enough to carry the story here. And the sense of exploration on said journey is much more satisfying in this movie than it was in Dinosaur, which was something of a depressing slog, both for the characters and for the audience. Without a crabapple like Kron to push them along, the whole affair has this open-world feeling that works so much better than a craggy-faced guy who keeps yelling “MOVE MOVE MOVE.”

The trouble that results from that, though is that it leaves all the antagonistic danger-producing to the Tyrannosaurus that follows the kids around. It served its initial purpose well, killing Littlefoot’s mother (and yes, that was very sad, much more so than Bambi’s mom), but when it turned up again, I found it rather boring. It also presents my old “Arbitrarily Silent Animal” issue. Why can’t Aladar talk to the Carnotaurs? Why can’t Tarzan talk to the cheetah? Why can’t the Rescuers talk to the alligators? Why can’t Ariel talk to the shark? You can’t build a world where the animals talk and then just say “except if they need to be antagonists, then they’re just animals.” Bothers me.

Ducky's family adopted a special needs kid, though, which is totally cool of them.

No, the fun is in the changing challenges they encounter. All suitably prehistoric, of course. There’s a tar pit, a volcano, a herd of (annoyingly silent) Pachycephalosauri, etc. These dramas can all sort of pile up on each other and make the action hard to follow at times, but they built their tension effectively and generally worked very well. The quiet moments are good, too, though there are a few that probably would have bored me as a child.

The voices are... acceptable. Look, it’s almost all child actors. No adults of note. As previously vouchsafed, Dom DeLuise isn’t even in this one, as he was doing Oliver and Company at the time, and either the schedules conflicted or possibly Bluth decided to pout over it. Pat Hingle has a tiny part, I guess that’s something. And when it comes to child actors, you have to expect that there’s not going to be great work coming out of them, with very few exceptions. One of those exceptions is in this movie, however, in the amazingly charming Judith Barsi. Barsi was a gifted child actor who was tragically murdered by her abusive father just prior to this movie’s release. He was a violent alcoholic who was resentful of his daughter’s success, and ended his life, his daughter’s, and her mother’s in a murder/suicide/arson, and for reasons unknown, his victims were buried in unmarked graves.

I mention this because her performance as Ducky, who should by all rights be a supremely annoying comic relief character, is really good and moving and delightful, and yet thanks to my knowledge of this, I was simultaneously happy and sad whenever she spoke, and now you have to be, too.

I'm a depressing statistic! Yep yep yep!

The animation is also good, though Bluth’s continuing budget struggles are occasionally apparent. The usual small issues with Fudd Flags, and the characters’ heads are often a different color than their recycled bodies, but it’s not really an issue. He uses camera filters a lot more in this, a soft focus one for flashbacks and a wobbly one for underwater. I have to admit, I was hoping for a lot more from this one, animation-wise. And it’s great, don’t get me wrong, but I was just hoping for a little more pop. And that kind of goes for the whole movie. It was great, but I was hoping for... I don’t know, nutty cuckoo super great.

Well, I’ll get plenty of pop in our next one, and while whether I get super-great remains to be seen, I’ll be loaded down with nutty cuckoo. Speaking of nutty cuckoo, here are three things I found on Tumblr while looking for images to include in this post, to make up for it being kind of a short one. Enjoy.

Completely accurate.

I'm sure whoever made this was certain they were making a good point.

I'm not surprised to find explicit fanart on the internet, of course. It's the little copyright notice in the corner that gets me. Yes, "Dark Nek Ogami", I'm sure now that you've given Universal their due credit, they're totally fine with your art.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Speaking of Dinosaur, I recently learned that it wasn’t counted as part of the canon until just a couple of years ago, when they added it retroactively so they could sell Tangled as #50. This infuriates me, because if they hadn’t, Winnie-The-Pooh would have had the 50 spot, which it richly deserves, and more importantly, I WOULDN’T HAVE HAD TO WATCH DINOSAUR.

* One aspect I didn’t comment on was the dinosaur names. Rather than refer to themselves as apatosaurus, triceratops, etc, they have their own names for their species. So the apatosaurs are “long-necks” and triceratops are “three-horns”, stegosaurs are “spike-tails”, and so forth. While it makes sense that they wouldn’t call themselves what humans named them, I do wonder what we’d be called under that system. “Naked-monkeys”?

I wonder what the crypto currency guy thinks of this.

* The characters seem confused on whether the little triceratops was named Cera or Sara. It’s Cera, but they are DEFINITELY saying Sara sometimes.

* Ebert said of this film  "I guess I sort of liked the film, although I wonder why it couldn't have spent more time on natural history and the sense of discovery, and less time on tragedy.” That sounds about right.

Shrek The Musical (DreamWorks Theatricals, 2008)

Well well well. In the words of Staind, it’s been a while. See, I got all enthusiastic that my newly stable job would allow me the sort of schedule that would allow for more regular writing, but I forgot one thing: How FREAKING exhausting it is to be a teacher at the end of the year. Or a full time teacher in general, really. And I had to keep the ol’ bookstore job in order to have it over the summer, so the end result was if I wasn’t working, I was flat on my back. So if you’ve been wondering where the updates at, I wish it was a more exciting story, but nope. I was working my dream job by day, working a job I also love at night, and sleepin’ in the middle.

Thing is, school’s been out for weeks, and I haven’t picked up the pen yet. Metaphorically. Typing with a pen is difficult. But even if it wasn’t, I still just keep running into a wall when trying to put together my thoughts on The Land Before Time. And as the days ticked by, my mind wandered back to the weeks of the NJASK. Because the NJASK, you see, is part of what led me on this dark path I’ve found myself on. No, not the path of the writer’s block. The path of I've watched Shrek The Musical five times this summer. See? I told you it was dark.

MUSIC!

ALLEGED COMEDY!

REDUNDANCY!

BAD PLANNING!

IT’S SHREK THE MUSICAL!

An American Tail (Sullivan Bluth, 1986)

Remember in the NIMH review when I said Bluth had no trouble attracting money for his future films? Well, he attracted something else, too, and it was something that sure didn’t make the money any harder to come by, because that something was named STEVEN FREAKING SPIELBERG. And Spielberg took a very hands-on approach to producing this film, which left Bluth with a lot of money, but also with an enthusiastic yet inexperienced (in animation, at least) executive. And with Spielberg’s money and art, there also came the marketing department and their sinister needs. Bluth’s first film was a scrappy little indie, but this new movie, the first from the newly formed Sullivan Bluth Studios, was suddenly a Big Deal. Would Bluth be able to rise to the challenge of going corporate so soon, or would the ideals that set him off on his own be scuttled? Well, Disney had just made The Black Cauldron, so there wasn’t too much pressure. Combining Spielberg’s inspiration, the storied history of the Jewish diaspora, and Bluth’s inspiration, talking mice wearing an inappropriate amount of clothing for the setting.

TRADITIOOOOOOOON!

TRADITION!

TRADITION!

IT’S AN AMERICAN TAIL!

The Secret of N.I.M.H. (Bluth Group, 1982)

IT’S FREAKING DON BLUTH TIME WOOOOOOOO. You all remember Don Bluth, right? The scrappy go-getter that started working at Disney as an animator, and decided to strike out on his own when he realized Disney was mostly making garbage anymore? Well, after scraping together the cash and resources to make the short “Banjo the Woodpile Cat”, Bluth and his partners were able to interest folks enough to get funding for a feature length production. The pressure was intense, with the former animators ready to take on the Mouse with… well, a mouse. Stick with what you know, I guess.

LEARNING!

SCIENCE!

MAGIC FOR SOME REASON!

IT’S THE SECRET OF N.I.M.H.!

Cats Don't Dance (Turner Feature Animation/Warner Bros., 1997)

The year were aught-ninety-seven. A 13-year-old Brian Lynch was perusing the VHS selection at the Arnold Schwartz Memorial Library. Since he was to be watching this movie with his younger brother and sister, he was in the kids section. “No matter,” said he, “For, after all, I still like cartoons. Why, 16 years from now, I’ll probably be writing a blog about them, whatever one of those is. What‘s this? ‘Cats Don‘t Dance‘? I‘ve never heard of such a thing. It‘s about a cat who wants to be a dancer? How foolish! How silly! Clearly this is an inferior animated product, designed only for the easily amused. I‘ll get the Little Nemo movie instead, there‘s a good life choice.” And time and again he went to that library, rolled his eyes at “Cats Don’t Dance”, and moved on, getting classic films like “The Saint”, “Phantoms”, and “Nothing But Trouble”. But that child is older now. He drives a car, and teaches at the school where he once was a student. He has traveled, sailed the ocean, and seen not one, not two, but six X-Men movies, three of which were pretty good. He has kissed girls, and done other things with them as well. He has finally gotten around to reading the one Wizard of Oz book the library didn’t have. And he has, at the age of 29, finally seen one of the finest animated films of all time.

SINGING!

DANCING!

A MOVIE THAT NEVER STOOD A CHANCE AT MAKING A PROFIT!

IT’S CATS DON’T DANCE!

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (Warner Bros, 1993)

For the next few weeks, we’re going to be shuffling around the calendar to take a look at Warner’s feature film output prior to the creation of their own studio. While they’d had some success distributing the work of independent studios - and we’ll be looking at those in a bit - their in-studio films had largely been just compilations of old Looney Tunes, with maybe 10 minutes of linking animation as far as new material. The movie we’re looking at today was the first feature-length animated movie made entirely by Warner Bros, but it wasn’t intended to be. See, shortly after the release of the terrible yet successful movie Batman Returns, TV cartoon creators Paul Dini and Bruce Timm were tasked with making a new Batman cartoon for TV. The result, “Batman: the Animated Series”, was massively successful with children and adults, fans and critics, and spawned the DC Animated Universe, which lasted for 15 years across 8 TV series, 4 films, and numerous shorts. Urged by the show’s early success, Warner quickly commissioned a direct-to-video movie, but the executives were so excited by what they saw in early development that they decided on giving it a full theatrical release - and then increasing the budget and expectations while not giving the creators any more time, resulting in a grueling eight-month production schedule and a small release with no promotion. Oops.


FISTICUFFS!

DETECTIVE STYLES!

OLD TIMEY CARS AND GUNS FOR NO REASON OTHER THAN THAT THEY LOOK COOL!

IT’S BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM!

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (Warner Bros. 2003)

With the smashing success of Space Jam, it’s kind of surprising that after it left theaters, Warner returned to not doing much of anything with the characters. There was the occasional straight to video short, or a terrible video game, and of course, the constant advertising, but a Space Jam sequel proved either beyond the company’s reach or beyond their ambition. I’m sure to this day there are “Space Jam 2” treatments rattling around Warners’ development hell division, probably about Lebron James at this point. But it wasn’t until 2003, 7 years after Space Jam, that the Tunes finally got another shot at the big screen. And this time, rather than a director cloaked in mystery, the film was in the hands of cult film mastermind Joe Dante. Would lightning strike twice? Or would this movie, unlike Space Jam, actually be preferable to being hit by lightning?

THRILLS!

LAFFS!

A COMEDY LEGEND DEEPLY DISAPPOINTING ME!
s
NO, NOT BILL MURRAY THIS TIME!

IT’S LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION!

Let’s talk about Joe Dante for a bit. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that of any live-action film director out there, he has the most Looney Tunes-like sensibility. This is often blatant, as in Gremlins, Gremlins II, Small Soldiers, and “It’s a Good Life” from the Twilight Zone movie. But it even seeps into his other work, as seen the anarchic mania of The ‘Burbs, the subverted nostalgia of Matinee, and even The Howling, which was a straight horror film, but still packed with inside jokes and references. When he was announced as the director of the new Looney Tunes movie, I was extremely excited. I literally can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have at the helm.

But there’s a flip side to that, too. Dante is not a director who plays nice with the studios. He tends to go over budget and over time due to his devotion to the craft, he always sides with writers and actors over executives, and his love of references and homages can result in free advertising - or worse, expensive licensing - for other studios. Like Terry Gilliam, he’s a director whose work has been very well-received, but who still has to struggle to get his dream projects funded. There’s a reason the majority of his work over the past 15 years has been TV episodes and anthologies.

But the trouble is, a Looney Tunes movie is obviously going to be micromanaged to infinity by the suits, as we saw with Space Jam. This led to the fear that Dante would be hamstrung by studio demands and not be able to really make the movie he wanted. And I regret to say that’s more or less the case. There are flashes of the usual Dante magic, and those were always the best parts of the movie. To wit:

Classic visual puns!

* Cameo appearances by Dick Miller and Robert Picardo. Miller has been in every one of Dante’s movies, and Picardo has been in all but two. Seeing them there reminded me of who was running this show.

* The reference jokes were really on point. An early scene features Shaggy and Scooby Doo at lunch with Matthew Lillard, complaining about how he portrayed Shaggy in the movie. A scene set at Area 52 (Area 51? That’s just a paranoid fantasy.) features appearances by the Metaluna Mutant, Ro-Man, Robby the Robot, a pair of Daleks, and, of course, Marvin the Martian.

* There was a lot of sniping at executives, in the film, particularly with a pair of characters called the Warner Brothers, a pair of childlike imbeciles who ran the company, and Kate, the executive who was put in charge of the Looney Tunes despite having no sense of humor or knowledge of the characters, because she could successfully monetize them. Huh. No wonder the studio hated him.

The best and worst anti-executive humor in the movie comes at the hands of the movie’s villains, the ACME corporation. Their boardroom is filled with a long line of Vice Presidents with ridiculous titles, including the VP in Charge of Bad Ideas, VP in Charge of  Being Unfairly Promoted, VP in Charge of Stating the Obvious, and (a cameo by Ron Perlman, yay!) VP in Charge of Never Learning. The worst… Ah, we’ll get to that. First, the plot, such as it is.

Look out, Brendan! That giant Timothy Dalton is about to shoot you!

 Like Space Jam, the film co-stars a popular human person alongside the Looney Tunes. Unlike Space Jam, the film is smart enough to put the Looney Tunes front and center, so it’s all good. The human of this film is Brendan Fraser, playing Warner Bros. security guard DJ Drake. Drake wants to be a stuntman, but his career has been sidelined after Brendan Fraser put the rumor out that he doesn’t use a stuntman, causing Drake’s work in the Mummy films to go unnoticed. Yeah, it’s a little weird. There is also Jenna Elfman as the aforementioned executive Kate, who fires Daffy Duck for being difficult to work with, then desperately tries to get him back, as Bugs refuses to work until she does. Drake and Duck (oh, I get it) eventually join with Kate and Bugs in attempting to rescue Drake’s father, an international superstar spy (played by Timothy Dalton) from the evil ACME corporation, and it’s chairman. (Steve Martin)

In order to explain how these plots come together would take far more time and effort than they’re worth, and I’m pretty sure the movie agrees with me on that point. Like I said last time, in a Looney Tunes endeavor, the plot can be thin as anything so long as the gags land. It’s an excuse plot. Spy stuff sends them to [Location], where [Looney Tunes villain] tries to prevent them from finding [Clue to next Location]. Repeat. The villain/location match-ups sometimes make sense (the Coyote in the American desert, Marvin the Martian at Area 51), sometimes are a bit of a stretch (Yosemite Sam in Vegas, the Tasmanian Devil in the jungle), and sometimes are just plain inexplicable (Elmer Fudd at the Louvre, Beaky Buzzard at the Eiffel Tower).

It’s heartening to see the Looney Tunes villains treated like actual villains, rather than, you know, basketball teammates. And it’s good to see lesser-remembered villains like the aforementioned Beaky Buzzard, Nasty Canasta, and Crusher. And the pseudo-villainous characters like Foghorn Leghorn and Sylvester also make appearances suitable to their personalities. Sadly, the absolute worst part of the movie is the main villain, the Chairman of ACME, played by Steve Martin.

STOP IT.

Oh my crap, it is impossible to describe just how awful this performance is. They took one of the finest, most Looney Tunes-ish comedians in the world, and then they give him this awful wig, and short pants, and he has NO funny lines, and his only joke is that things don’t work when he tries to use them, and I HATE IT. When Bill Murray shows up and phones it in, I can roll my eyes and say “Eh, whatever, he picked up a paycheck.” But Martin is giving 100% energy to this absolute turd of a character. I don’t know how Martin or Dante or even the studio hacks could have thought this was funny. It’s not remotely.

There are other big problems, too. The ending sequence, despite the inclusion of Duck Dodgers, is overlong and tedious, and a lot of the bits spread through the rest of the movie are unfunny and unneeded. The human cast is, apart from Martin, good enough. Bill Goldberg does his job well as a silent henchmen, Joan Cusack is charming, if trying a bit too hard, as the Q-esque head of Area 52, and Heather Locklear plays a Vegas lounge singer, and is very… Heather Locklear. Oh my, yes she is. As for our leads, Fraser is his usual likeable self, and Elfman is funny enough in her scenes with the Tunes, but together, they have all the chemistry of a bag of wet newspapers.

Oh my, yes she is.

The animation cast, unsurprisingly, fares better. There’s only two voice holdovers from Space Jam; Bob Bergen as Porky Pig, who doesn’t do much, and Billy West as Elmer Fudd. West was replaced as Bugs by Joe Alaskey, who also plays Daffy, Sylvester, and a few others. He’s a phenomenal Bugs, and while his Daffy’s not as acerbic as Dee Baker’s, it’s fun to have them played by the same guy, in classic Looney Tunes style. And since the daffy side of Daffy is emphasized in this movie, a less abrasive voice was called for. Warner animation utility man Jeff Bennett plays Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam to perfection.

The animation was directed by another Disney favorite of mine, Eric Goldberg, who not only made the movie look ten times better than Space Jam, but also expertly voiced Marvin the Martian, Speedy Gonzalez, and Tweety. This is not the most surprising voice casting in the movie, though, as the end credits revealed to me that the Tasmanian Devil was actually voiced by Brendan Fraser, who did such a good job, I never would have guessed it wasn’t one of their regulars.

So yeah, it’s not a very good movie. But you know, it’s the kind of not very good movie where you wind up spending most of your blog entry talking about all the things you liked in it. So even if you don’t have a blog, go ahead and give it a shot. The individual bits are more enjoyable than not, the actors - except Steve Martin - are decent, and it’s a good-enough looking movie.

All right, you slop artist.

So that’s it for Warner Brothers Feature Animation. In our next entry, we’ll move once again back in time, to take a look at the flop that first got Warner interested in producing their own animated fare.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Another way Dante is like Terry Gilliam is that they keep being offered big budget tentpoles and then losing them. The greatest superhero movie never made is Dante’s 1987 film “Batman”, starring Alec Baldwin as Batman and Tim Curry as the Joker. Oh, it would have been so good.

* Other ACME Vice Presidents include the VP in Charge of Climbing to the Top, the VP in Charge of Rhetorical Questions, the VP in Charge of Child Labor, and the VP in Charge of  Nitpicking.

"Doc, I don't think a remake of Fatal Attraction is right up my alley."

* This was the last movie with music composes by Jerry Goldsmith, a legend at genre-film scoring who died just prior to completing the score. The soundtrack is typically excellent for him.

* After one really tedious bit with the Chairman, which included a shoehorned Michael Jordan cameo, he triumphantly states “Who’s laughing now!? Apparently no one.” True words, man. True words.

Well. That's meta.