An American Tail

An American Tail (1986)
Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Phillip Glasser, Nehemiah Persoff, John P. Finnegan and Dom DeLuise

[content warning: extensive talk of antisemitism, immigrant persecution, child labor, trauma-inducing images and a brief reference to the Irish-English conflict]

Plot:

After their home is burned in an anti-Jewish pogrom in the 1880s, a family of Russian mice emigrate to the United States. Separated from the rest of his family upon arrival, young Fievel Mousekewitz sets out on a quest to find them, and ends up inspiring the mice of New York City to fight back against the cats that are oppressing them.

Nostalgia:

As I said in my The Land Before Time review, I know that this was one of the first movies that my parents took me to see in the theater. However, I have absolutely no memory of doing so, and only remember it from the VHS copy that I grew up with. I did have a Fievel stuffed animal, however, that I retained for a very long time – probably at least middle school, if not high school.

Review:

What is it with Don Bluth and making incredibly dark movies, anyway? This is the second Bluth movie I’ve watched for this project, and I have strong memories of the other two big Bluth movies (The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven). And from what I’ve seen and remember, all four have content that would be likely to give their target audience nightmares. It’s like each successive movie in his filmography was playing an escalating game of “hold my beer” with childhood trauma.

This movie begins with the destruction of the Mousekewitz family home in Russia by Cossacks, in a rather intense burst of sudden violence. While I was definitely too young to understand what was going on, I now find it pretty clear that this is supposed to be an anti-Semitic pogrom, especially given the family’s surname and nationality. Their religion is never brought up explicitly during the film, though there’s definite allusions to it in the ending (more on that later). While I think that there’s definitely a missed opportunity for more concrete representation here, I’m not sure how much of it really would have fit the narrative they devised, given how much of the movie focuses on a fairly young child trying to navigate a city on his own. 

Speaking of which, this movie really doesn’t shy away from the horrors that might happen to a lost kid in 1880s New York. Almost the first thing that happens to Fievel after he arrives is being sold into labor in a sweatshop by a businessman that pretends to be helping him find his family. He gets chased, nearly eaten, attacked by humans, and even after triumphing over the cats is left for dead and ends up crying alone in a puddle in the rain. Thanks, Bluth, for attempting to traumatize the parents this time as well as the kids.

But hey, at least there are songs in this one, to break the depressing mood and give some light to the movie, right? Yeah, about that… The songs are all pretty memorable, even if I only remembered the one distinctly going in. However, even the happy ones are quite dark when you look at them closer. The big rousing number at the beginning, “There Are No Cats in America”, in addition to being dramatic irony itself in that we the audience know that there are indeed cats there, is actually just a series of stories of loss and murder. The Italian mouse portrays cats as mob bosses who murder his mother (in what might be a Godfather IIreference), and the Irish mouse’s girlfriend is eaten by a calico – a cat whose colors could easily be described as “black and tan.”

And the actual plan that the mice enact to get rid of their cat oppressors is something right out of a horror movie. I only had vague memories of the movie’s ending, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a steampunk mecha-mouse version of the Golem of Prague! The fact that the “Great Mouse of Minsk” is clearly rotoscoped over actual photographs of a real-life version of the thing makes it even creepier and nightmare-inducing. Are we absolutely sure that Bluth wasn’t paid off by a cartel of unscrupulous child psychologists looking for extra business?

Despite all of that, however….I still actually enjoyed the movie! The animation itself is gorgeous, obvious rotoscoping aside, and all of the songs are quite memorable. I’m not sure I’m going to be showing it to my nieces like, ever, but as an adult I definitely appreciate the craft that went in to making it a lot more than I did as a child. Still not sure why I never had any nightmares about it, though.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: B+, extensive “WTH, Bluth!?” notwithstanding

Stray Thoughts:

-“Somewhere Out There” positively destroys me every time. I watched this on my laptop using a Buffalo Wild Wings’ public wifi, and I was sloppy-crying in the restaurant.

-Even though critics were mixed on the movie, it ended up becoming the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film in U.S. history up to that point. It actually beat the Disney movie released that year, The Great Mouse Detective, at the box office by quite a lot. Disney and Bluth would have a rivalry for several more movies, going head-to-head until The Little Mermaid started the Disney Renaissance and pretty much ended Bluth’s time as a major competitor.

Flight of the Navigator

Flight of the Navigator (1986)
Dir. by Randal Kleiser

Starring Joey Cramer, Howard Hesseman and Paul Reubens (credited as “Paul Mall”)

Plot:

12-year-old David Freeman hits his head in 1978 and wakes up in 1986, having not aged a day. Confronted by a family that thinks he’s dead and a strange world he doesn’t know, he learns that he was abducted by an alien drone, which needs the star charts inserted in his head to complete its mission and return home.

Nostalgia:

I have absolutely no idea when I first watched this. I’d guess on the Disney Channel, considering it was distributed by Disney in the States, but I remember it mainly for the taped-off-TV version we had. I watched it a lot as a pre-teen, but I don’t know if I’ve seen it since before I was in high school. Still remember a lot of scenes from it, though.

Review:

What a wonderful, charming movie. I remembered the basic plot outline, a bunch of individual scenes, and that Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman) was the voice of the alien. What I didn’t remember is how good the movie was.

As the titular navigator, Joey Cramer does an amazing job capturing not only the E.T.-esque wonder of a child befriending an alien, but also the genuine confusion and fear of one who’s been displaced in time, forced to engage with a world he doesn’t recognize and family that might as well be strangers. That first scene where he comes home to find that an elderly couple is now living in his house, with him frantically running through the rooms, is one of the most realistic acting jobs by a child actor I’ve ever seen. He very convincingly runs through the gamut of emotions, from surprise, to disbelief, to mock-amusement at the practical joke he assumes is being played on him, to finally breaking down in the bathroom and sobbing for his parents.

Now that's a set

I’m also glad that Paul Reubens didn’t grate on me nearly as much as I feared he would. I remember him as being in most of the movie, but in reality his recognizable voice work doesn’t begin until over two-thirds through the movie, when Davey and the robotic pilot Max have a mind-meld to transfer the star charts back to the probe. It’s only then that Reubens begins his Pee Wee-style line delivery, as Max starts to act like a particularly obnoxious teenager for about twenty minutes. Before this, Reubens had affected an almost Spock-like delivery of his lines, and I must confess that I definitely enjoyed this version of Max better. However, I was able to tolerate the other Max, as it really wasn’t in that much of the film and had frequent cut-aways to Davey’s family or the NASA goons.

Speaking of which, I found it a little odd that NASA would be the “evil government agency” of choice for this movie. They seem to have much more in the way of resources than they should have, especially the sort of field agents that you’d expect from the FBI or CIA. Yes, NASA would probably be the ones to investigate a crashed alien ship in the 1980s, but I doubt that they’d be holding a family hostage in their own home or scrambling intercept jets on their own authority. It’s not the most egregious error I’ve ever seen, however, especially for a family film, so I’ll let it slide.

Finally, the effects really do hold up overall. The shape-shifting drone ship was done with CGI, and it actually still looks good today, an especially impressive feat given the rudimentary state of mid-80s computer graphics. This was only two years after The Last Starfighter, whose effects don’t really hold up at all to a modern eye. Also impressive were the menagerie of alien creatures being cared for by Max. They were all created practically as puppets, and range from disgustingly cute to just plain disgusting. About the only effect that didn’t still look great were the steps to interior of the ship. The door is supposed to melt, flow down and form into floating steps, but the rotoscope animation they used for the effect looks noticeably out of place with the rest of the quality effects (and way worse than I remember it looking).

I think that this movie has kind of been forgotten in the annals of great kids’ movies. It’s got a really wonderful central performance, imaginative effects, and a great sense of adventure. I could definitely see a modern remake of it being successful – the Jim Henson Company has been trying to get one going with the showrunner of Lucifer as writer. I’d like to see that.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A

Stray Thoughts:

-Honestly, this might be the longest I’ve gone without seeing a movie for this project that still held up on rewatch. I really enjoyed this one, y’all.

-Surprise actor #247 for this project: an extremely young Sarah Jessica Parker, fresh off her starring role in Square Pegs, as the NASA intern that befriends Davey and helps him escape with the ship.

-Star Trek Actor Watch: Davey’s dad is played by Cliff DeYoung, who was in a first-season episode of DS9 (“Vortex”, where he played a con-man alien with potential knowledge of Odo’s species). Since he was in so much makeup for the role, I didn’t recognize him at all, but the name sounded familiar in the credits and I looked him up.