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justonerobot
Reviews
Mulan (1998)
beautiful at times, but far from a classic
Somewhere in 'Mulan' is a great story. In fact you can feel the potential all through the first half of the film. Lush backgrounds, wonderful character design, and a promising premise. Enter Eddie Murphy and everything falls flat. Not to say that it is his fault alone but whenever Mushu appears you can almost see the studio exec memos saying 'more comic relief' or 'more kid appeal'. Yeesh. A friend of mine suggested that the character may have been better silent or as a ghost that Mulan could only see. Something falls flat in the second half of the film that is never quite retrieved which is a real shame. The folks at Disney could use a few lessons in subtlety in storytelling from the Chinese.
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
The film has not dated well...
I saw the film on the big screen last night at the Harvard Film Archive and I have to say that it has not aged well. There are odd plot devices with mess with continuity and poor animation at times. Regarding the first point, Belle's horse pops in and out as she conveniently needs it. She gains super-human strength having hoisted the Beast onto her horse and pulling his massive weight back onto the balcony at the climax. I realize the problems of configuring a fairy tale to fit into a 70 minute all-ages format but it messes with the mystery of the fairy tale.
'Snow White' was as linear a narrative, but there was intense attention to detail and empathy. You never really know what it motivating characters in 'Beast'. She goes from hating him to loving him from one scene to the next. Her own character comes off as conceited as Gaston at times. (Me?! The wife of that boorish...) Additionally, the attention to detail and consistency in character design now seems like light-years from this film. Each character looks as though drawn by a different hand which shows the lack of control in art direction that exists now. Some of these are down right sloppy in long-shots. 'Beauty' was a transitional film as the studio was adapting to more digital techniques (digital ink and paint, computer animation) and the glitches in hand-drawn techniques help to date the film. At times the Beast is massive in scale and at others (after her befriends Belle) he is only slightly larger than her. It becomes cumbersome to look at him after a while. Once he does 'come into the light', his mystery is broken and the final design feels unsatisfactory. The supporting characters (townspeople, etc.)are not drawn well at all and one needs only to look at a film like 'Pinocchio' to see what solid animation art direction is. I understand why 'Beauty' makes everyone's top movie lists but it deserves criticism as much as any other film especially since the bar has been raised for animation storytelling since 1991.
Trail Mix-Up (1993)
Disney being bad...heh heh
I remember 'Entertainment Weekly' panning this cartoon when it came out for its crudeness and sexiness. I'll agree that the 'dropped a log' line is a bit much but on the whole the cartoon seems to be a foil for Disney animator's frustrations with the 'Disney' way of storytelling. To that end, this is the most violent and faced-paced of the Roger Rabbit shorts with Roger getting threatened by a shot gun, bashed countless times, with a face-ful of bee sting welts, and sliced up by the saw-mill.
The drawings are certainly not top-notch with Roger and Baby looking like distant cousins of their characters in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit'. The backgrounds are bright and lively but this certainly is the most forgettable Maroon Cartoon short and possibly why others were not produced. Less an homage to Tex Avery and other 1940's-50's cartoon shorts, it just goes a little too far cramming one rabbit-pummeling gag after another.