1 post tagged “everything was better when we were kids”
Something that has surprised me since becoming a parent is that there aren't very many kids' films. Perhaps to a non-parent it seems like there are tons of kids' films but it's surprising to me that we can't go to the movies every weekend, for example. Even if I were willing to see the same film more than once, there still wouldn't be an appropriate film in the theatres every week. I mention this only because if I could I would absolutely spent every Saturday afternoon at a matinée.
Somewhat out of the ordinary, and perhaps this is due to the impending (American) holiday season, we did spend this afternoon and last Saturday at the movies. This week we saw Warner Brothers' Happy Feet (which, if you check out the film's web site, it has a live web cam feed from the Maryland Zoo); last week, it was the Dreamworks/Aardman collaboration Flushed Away.
I had some reservations about Flushed Away. When I first saw trailers for it last spring, I was disappointed to see Aardman had abandoned its traditional stop-action clay figure work for CGI. (It turns out they've done quite a lot in CGI, though this is the first feature film.) I love stop action animation, right down to the fingerprints on the figures' faces. There's a warmth and creativity in the genre that I think is unparalleled in computer generated imagery.
The film is a fairly simple county mouse/city mouse, uptown boy meets downtown girl story. Roddy St. James, a pet rat, is flushed from his posh Kensington digs by a home invading lager lad. When he arrives in the sewers he meets a cracker jack parade of proletarian characters, and it's clear from the start they will teach him a lesson about what really matters in life. There is some jewel thievery, a Ralph Cramden/Fred Flintstone desire to get rich quick and escape the squalor scheme, an apocalyptic plot by an evil dictator, more than one chase scene, and, seemingly inevitable, a star-crossed and improbably mis-matched love story, proving that as long as one has love, one has anything and that if your names share a first initial you're bound for matrimony.
The narrative, though perhaps a little lacking in sophistication, is fine for children's fare. It's not dazzling, I wasn't left awed by the creativity or daring, but neither was it unnecessarily meandering or confusing. The cast is a powerhouse of actors with accents (variously British, Australian and French). Jean Reno was a particularly inspired choice to play the leader of a team of frog hitmen, and Ian McKellan is as brilliant as a megalomanical Toad as he is in anything else. Kate Winslet does a serviceable working class accent for Rita and Hugh Jackman was fine as the posh Roddy, but I couldn't help thinking the character had been written with Hugh Grant's kind of bumbling charisma in mind. The real stand-outs were the Greek chorus of crooning slugs, though, by far the most endearing feature of the film, in my opinion.
What the CGI lacked in warmth--there were several moments in the film, for example, particularly during high action scenes, that suffered from that hideous pixelation around the edges of objects that I can hardly stand to look at--it (almost) made up for in detail. There were lots of little bits and bobs that might not have made it into stop action, and they did add a certain richness. It's interesting to me how the technology shapes storytelling. There were portions of the high speed boat chase scenes that would not have been possible in claymation. Not that there haven't been chase scenes in Aardman pics in the past (Curse of the Were-Rabbit has a few, for example) but they were more or less tethered to the laws of physics. With CGI, anything goes, though I'm happy to say in this film (unlike a lot of the giganto-Hollywood blockbusters in which I have no interest) it didn't get in the way of telling a good story. I just hope, with all my heart, this doesn't mean the end of stop-action for Aardman.
Happy Feet suffered none of the pixelation I loathed in Flushed Away. (I've always taken this to be a sign of cheap production; it makes shows like The Backyardigans literally unwatchable for me. The flickering and edges have such a strobing effect, I'm half afraid of a seizure.) It is hands-down the most sumptuous example of computer animation I have ever seen. It has warmth and a richness of detail, and only occasionally looks mechanical or slightly off. (Long "crane shots" of lots of penguins dancing, for example, look too mathematically precise or something in a way that is disconcerting, and, of course, humans always look just a little bit wrong.) There were several moments in the film where I stopped myself and wondered whether I was still seeing animation. (There is actually a live action cast of humans for a portion of the film--a wise choice given how impossible it seems to be to create really convincing humans in CGI--but there are other parts that seem as realistically live action that are not.)
The acting was also pretty good. Unlike so many animated films that use big name Hollywood actors, I wasn't pulled out of the story time and again by the actors being too much themselves. In fact, until I read the credits at the end, I didn't realize that Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brittany Murphy and Hugo Weaving were in it. Even Robin Williams, often so uncontrollably himself in animated films, was subdued in the two parts he played. And the music, which is central to the film, is fun and mostly well-chosen and performed. Although there were certainly some questionable choices, like Prince's Kiss "You don't have to be beautiful, to turn me on, I just need your body, baby, from dusk 'til dawn" and then, even better, at one point, the chorus from "Gloria," though I will allow that would be over the head of most kids. Despite my reservations about Robin Williams, he did perform a convincing rendition of "A mi manera".
Where Happy Feet stumbles (get it? stumbles?) is the plot. Or, plots. Or, lack of plots. Or something. I wasn't at all surprised to see four names on the screenwriting credit. It's a total dog's dinner of a script. It reeks of rewrites and bad editing and committee work. What's the movie about? Being yourself? Going your own way? The strictures of tradition? How love can heal you? That humans, orcas and leopard seals suck? That Mexicans are lazy but lots of fun and white people work hard but need to lighten up? That black men have big cocks? At first I thought it as just me, like I wasn't paying attention or had accidentally dozed off or something, but then, as it jumped from here to there, and meandered and back tracked and wended and weaved and plodded ceaselessly onward I realized, Ah, no, this is bad bad writing. So bad!
I'm not sure I could even summarize the plot for you. The trailers make the story seem simple: a penguin is born, a dancer in a tribe of singers, outcast, but eventually loved and esteemed. Like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer with flippers. And that's part of it, except Mumbles the penguin is cast out, meets up with some Latino penguins, is the shit in their neighbourhood, goes back home, is cast out again, goes back to the other hood (? maybe? I can't remember...) then crosses Antarctica to find humans, then loses the humans, then ends up in a zoo, then, somehow, finally, makes it back home and is embraced. The whole second cycle of rejection and redemption is where the film lost me. The penguins are starving because humans are taking all the fish. So the penguin decides to fine humans and ask us to stop. After a harrowing journey, a narrow escape from some killer whales, and an utterly terrifying run-in with an ice breaker, Mumbles the Emperor, his five Latino sidekicks and the Williams-voiced Barry White-inflected guru penguin Lovelace, stand on the icy cliffs and watch fishing trawlers in the distance. Lovelace says that they've done all they can and it's a noble end to their journey, but it's time to go home. Mumbles says he must carry on, and Lovelace says, but what can you do? And honest to god, if the movie had ended there it might have been salvageable, but instead it goes on for a 45 minute environmental rant that leaves you eyeing the exits. And I like environmental rants.
Gaping holes and heavy handed narrative aside, there are all kinds of other aspects to the film that annoyed me. The love story, for one, and this is a complaint that applies equally well to Flushed Away. My kid is three; I would say the median age of kids in the theatre both this week and last was 5 or 6. What do kids this young need a love story for? I mean, the central driving force (while it had one, there at the beginning) of the penguin movie, was that this poor hapless penguin would never be able to find a mate because he was a tuneless tap-dancing hack. It was thoroughly pre-occupied with love and finding love and true love and mates for life and the whole thing, and I thought, DAMN, the indoctrination into heterosexual monogamy starts so young and not just in the obnoxious Disney princess films.
And then there's the whole aspect of race and ethnicity. The emperor penguins, I guess they were white (there are few whose heart songs are hip-hop, so maybe there is supposed to be some ethnic diversity there?). When Mumbles is exiled, he hooks up with a bunch of Adelie penguins, among whom he is admired for his dancing feet. The Adelie are Latino inflected, and there's such a mishmash of cultural stereotypes, all played for humour, of course, that's it put me off the rest of the film. It's the way the laid-back, lazy, open-mindedness of the Adelie are used as a counterpoint to the uptight, upstanding, Emperors that is particularly offensive. There some business about foreigners, and maybe it even veers over to unwanted immigration when they end up visiting the emperor penguins? It's all sort of minor and back-handed and seemingly not deliberate, because so little of the film seems to have an deliberation at all, that it's hard to get a handle on what the allegory is supposed to be, exactly. It's almost like they opened a can of works and then just decided to pretend they hadn't.
But then there's this throwaway line from Williams, after Lovelace performs a Barry White (inspired) tune, where all he beckons all the swooning chica penguins back to his gigantic next that goes something like "I know size can be daunting, don't be afraid, I love you," that is so vile and so completely inappropriate for a kids flick I was momentarily stunned.
And then what's with having Robin Williams voice both the most prominent of the "Latino" penguins and the the obviously black Barry White penguin? There aren't any black or Latino voice actors in Hollywood? (To be fair, the other four penguins are voiced by Latinos, but still.) The way race is handled in the film is such that, as usual, anyone who calls attention to it will be dismissed as trying to be too PC and making an issue of race in everything, but the reality is, it's the film-makers who introduce race to the film and in a thoroughly repugnant way.
For what it's worth, the girl loved both movies. Happy Feet had some truly terrifying scenes, but she didn't seem to mind, which surprised me. About a month ago we saw Open Season (which I will dissect tomorrow) and she was so scared at parts we had to leave. I thought these scenes were much scarier, but even when asked she said, No, that just startled me. Now I just have to work to deconstruct the racial and gender stereotypes.
