When you get in trouble and you forget to post a review

Greetings once again, dear readers, this post is a special post.  Actually that's a lie, it's another movie review, but it's special because it's the first time I've done a movie prior to the 1950s.  I dunno, it seems special since I feel like I've been avoiding the early Disney films like the plague and that could be because six of them aren't movies but just a collection of shorts packaged in movie form (well, it was the 40s, we didn't have tv so I get why but I refuse to review the things).  Long story short, I'm reviewing Pinocchio

Pinocchio was the 2nd Disney feature film to ever be made and, I was quite surprised to find out it is 83 minutes long, for comparison, Dumbo was 64 minutes long and it only came out a year after but then again, it's not how long the movie is, or how short for that matter, it is the pacing of the film that counts and the pacing of Pinnochio works quite fine, but that's not really the point.

This Pinocchio is based off the book of the same name, kinda I mean the original Italian tale is one of those long ass titles, and as is par for the Disney adaptation the moral of the work is the same, just a few details are modified or changed.  Honestly, I could write a book on the number of changes made for each Disney film based off another work so it's almost pointless to really bring up adaptation accuracy at this point because it's kinda redundant at this stage.

One of the things that I have always enjoyed with this film is everything that is going on in Gepetto's house, I mean he makes clocks, music boxes and puppets and the great thing about all these inventions is the detail gone into the animation of all of them.  There is an entire scene devoted to the different cuckoo clocks he made and frankly it's something every creative person should be shown, from animation to actual carpentry people because of how complex their designs are.  But really I'm just gussing over one of my favourite scenes in the film, everything just flows so well, it's ripe with a lot of politically incorrect notions, not to mention things that would never make it into a children's work these days unless they really hid it well, sigh, such different times.

Now, while I really love all of the contraptions Gepetto has made and the pacing of this movie and stuff (even the horrifying donkey stuff) there are some things that I don't enjoy as much, and as usual that's the songs.  Now I'd love to say I'm spoiled by the renaissance songs of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin but I grew up watching Pinocchio and a lot of the earlier Disney films, plus I really dig songs like Little April Showers and Casey Junior (hell even some of the songs in Snow White) but the songs here just kind of come off as lame.  However I could be missing the point that some of the songs ARE supposed to be lame, hell look at No Strings on Me, considering the situation what more could we expect than a half-assed show from Stromboli.  Whenever Jiminy sings is kinda okay but it also comes off to me as "ok, that was an interesting song, but you didn't HAVE to have it" but I get a kick out of Honest John singing Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee because there's nothing more awesome than a con man conning you in song-form, there's just something extra cocky and arrogant about it, which fits H. John's character to a T.

At the end of the day, I like Pinocchio, little quibbles aside, this is a film that if someone says to me "hey you wanna watch this?" I will answer yes to, in place of other Disney films?  Maybe not but it's different than if people ask me if I want to watch The Little Mermaid because I will always answer yes for this film.

Why Should I Watch This?

Good day, for my next review I am going to continue with Disney films that I haven't seen in a long time, either because I forgot about them, or because I didn't like them as much as other Disney films (that kinda sounds like the same reason but whatever).  The selection this time will be an 80s pick, the last movie before the Renaissance period, I am going to talk about Oliver and Company:

As is standard for Disney, we are doing another twist on a story that's already been told, that story being Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist and with the added Disney cliche of having it be animals portraying the characters instead of humans.  This story also doesn't take place in London, England, it is taking place in New York City but that's all semantics, the story is more or less intact, the names of the characters are the same (well, the major ones) and their parts in the story are essentially directly transplanted from Twist.

I'm gonna go back to just giving a review of the film and my overall opinion and will save indepth breakdowns and stuff for later installments simply because that's a lot of writing and works better with a foothold.  With that in mind, I mentioned in the opening that this is a movie that I have kind of forgotten about, now that could be because I never owned this film, but I owned Cinderella and The Little Mermaid as well and I stopped watching those movies until I felt the need to review them as well so I don't think ownership is the problem.  Now I think one of the problems I ended up having was that as time marched on, there were some things in this film that I either got bored of, or just started realising that those things weren't good.  Now the big thing with that was probably the songs.

This film came out before The Little Mermaid so it was before Howard Ashman and Alan Menken came on board to bring their Broadway style of songs for Disney films, but Oliver & Company still has quite a few musical numbers so we're still in the typical Disneyfaire of having several musical numbers as either a form of exposition or a way to entertain.  It's kind of a mixed batch here, the movie starts with an overture for the first couple of minutes showing how shit life is for Oliver as an orphan kitty but the songs following are kinda lame.  Dodger's "Why Should I Worry" was cool when I was young, but now to me it just feels like if Tramp had a song, and that saddens me.  If Tramp didn't need a song to be as cool as he was, Dodger singing wasn't inherently necessary.  Of course I think the worst song is Georgette's song, it is kinda unnecessary and is just one of those "oh crap, we need to fill more time, let's just toss a song in here" type of songs.  However, with me saying that the songs (except the New York City song at the beginning) drag the movie down, the rest of the movie is actually fairly well done.

The film does a good job of tugging at your heart either for Jenny finding an actual friend in Oliver because her parents are never around (man, Disney loves doing that shit too) or how Oliver finds family with Dodger and his pals.  Even Fagan is a well done character, he's just such a hopeless person who will do anything to get out of his debt to Sykes, but he still isn't so far gone that he'll allow Sykes to kidnap a little girl.  I would also like to add that Sykes is a villain that doesn't seem to get a lot of love in the Disney community, but I don't get why not, he's a pretty scary person, probably because he's a very real villain.  You get a kind of chill when you realise that there are lots of people like him in the real world and only in the world of Disney do they get their just desserts.

All in all, I would say that if either, the songs were not present, or if the songs were done better, I would probably finish this filming saying "well, that was a pretty fun movie" but as it stands, it has heart in lots of places, the overall story and how that progresses is actually really good.  But the Disney songs and even a lot of the running jokes and gags are either tedious to begin with or they run on too long and drag at the end of the film.  I still say that this movie is largely a movie I would pass on if I had the option of watching other movies, but if all else, I would still choose to watch this movie, and just have my thumb hovering over the fast-forward button.

part 2 of that promise

Ok, well I said I would do a double feature and by gum I will keep parts of my promises to myself, so let's get right to it and talk about The Little Mermaid:

Everyone knows The Little Mermaid, either because it was a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen, or because it was the Disney film that brought the company out of the "dark ages" and back on top of the world of animation...sort of.  This film also set the stage of what you do for animation for the next decade, so we'll basically say that The Little Mermaid popularised the musical animated movie.  This also heralded the return to animation styles akin to Cinderella and Snow White, hence why everyone refers to The Little Mermaid beginning the Disney Renaissance.  This was also the first official Disney Princess film since Sleeping Beauty, 30 years of separation.


Moving along, The Little Mermaid is the story of a mermaid who dreams of something more, the general theme of Disney Princess films, and her more is being amongst the land dwellers because their lives just seem so different and just sooo much better than her life.  Now granted this is also what happens in the Andersen story, there are a bunch of sisters that are all growing up and the big thing about growing up is that when you're "of age" you get to go up to the surface for a day and see what makes it so great.  The sisters all have their turn and the youngest (the "little mermaid") always asks them what they saw because she is anxious.  When it's finally her turn she goes up and admires all the things that her sisters saw, the sky, the landscape, but what catches her eye is a boat.  She sees a man on it and she instantly falls in love with him.  This stirs up problems down below because, well, they're mermaids, they kinda can't up and go on the surface so the mermaid's kinda setting herself up for tragedy with this fixation.


Now since this film is an adaptation, liberties are taken and those liberties mainly fall under "it seems kind of sudden that the girl is fixated on living with the humans in the story, so let's just make her dream of it from the start, like all of our princesses" and we go from there.  We also get rid of that whole "every mermaid chills on the surface for 1 day when they reach a certain age" aspect because, well it's probably just a lot easier to play the prejudice card and just say the surface is forbidden, this also helps strengthen the whole "I want something more, something no one else can have" thing Disney Princesses have.  This also gives ample opportunities for Ariel to chill near the surface or even on the surface on an almost daily basis (having a seagull for a pal helps).  However, there has to be a way to get conflict going.


Ariel meets her prince by safely moving him to the shore after his ship is capsized in a storm and then she falls madly in love with him and problems arise.  Her dad doesn't like it for obvious reasons, you know they're half-fish so Ariel's setting herself up for disappointment and then he decides to knuckle down and start punishing.  With a rebellious attitude, Ariel takes off to see Ursula, the sea-witch to see if she could help her achieve her goals of meeting her prince and getting a chance for him to fall in love with her.  This is virtually unchanged from the Andersen tale, Ariel and the unnamed mermaid both visit the sea-witch with the express purpose of somehow getting to the surface in a human form, and they both trade their voices BUT the main difference is in Andersen's tale, the mermaid will die if the prince marries another woman, and Ariel will become those weird skeletal worms that adorn Ursula's lair.  Now this is important for discrepancies, in the tale, the Sea Witch is not "evil" she is just ambitious and will do business if business is presented to her, but Ursula has a bone to pick with the king because she was kicked out of the kingdom and so she wants a bartering chip, and Ariel fits the bill.


This is where things deviate majorly, our mermaid in the story is charming the pants off of the prince but his father wants him to marry a princess from another land and the prince will have none of that because he loves a priestess that saved him (even though it was the mermaid that did that).  Just when he starts changing his mind to loving the mermaid because he'll probably never see the priestess again, the princess reveals that it was she that found him on the beach because she happened to be at the temple for educational purposes...yeah.  The mermaid loses the deal but her sisters made a deal for her to return to the sea, but she will have to kill the prince and her love for him won't allow that so she dies and becomes sea foam.  Except when she turns into a spirit because she has a good heart and other kiddy, moralistic stuff.  Ariel on the other hand, has no priestess/princess to compete with for the prince's affections.  Ursula is aware of this and since she thought that taking her voice would've been enough to screw Ariel over knows that she'll have cheat the system a little to win.  She transforms into a girl and uses Ariel's voice to trick the prince (she also uses magic to control him as well) pretending that she was the girl that Eric heard when he came to after the shipwreck.  Several stock Disney hijinks later, Ariel almost wins the bet but Ursula still wins at the last second and so Ariel is now her property.


Everyone knows how the movie goes after that, so no need to drag this out any further.  This is another Disney film that I recall watching when I was younger, but I also recall only watching from the last half on, starting at the song "Poor Unfortunate Souls".  I'm not sure why this is exactly, probably still had a lot to do with the fact that this was a girl's movie so it was "lame".  These days?  Yeah, still a girl's movie, and some of the songs just don't get along with me, everyone loves "Under the Sea" but I personally don't like it, it's just too uppity for me, too uppity for Disney, and that's saying something.  However, I've always like the villain, which is probably also why I watched the second half, lots of Ursula being a villain and acting instead of plotting.  Ursula is a more standardised villain, she has a past grudge and will do anything she can to get back at those that "wronged" her, she has a goal, she has a reason to be evil.  But in some ways you have to wonder, why do I like Ursula for being a by-the-book villain and Lady Tremaine for being a "just because" villain?  Well, it boils down to presentation, Lady Tremaine takes sadistic pleasure in torturing Cinderella and Ursula's magic and spectacle just creeps the crap out of you, not to mention that she has a horde of "former customers" to show you that she always wins, heck if this wasn't Disney, those wouldn't be worms that used to be mermaids (maybe they were fish too?  Who knows) those would be bones.


In conclusion, I will just say that there are parts of this movie I quite enjoy (Poor Unfortunate Souls and Les Poissons are awesome songs) but the vast majority of the movie just falls flat for me and doesn't leave a lasting impact.