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.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Dir. by Mel Stuart

Starring Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum and Jack Albertson

[content warning: racism, a seriously traumatizing boat ride]

Plot:

When eccentric and reclusive candy company magnate Willy Wonka announces a contest for a lifetime supply of chocolate, a worldwide hunt begins for five Golden Tickets. Poor paperboy Charlie Bucket lucks into the final Ticket, and together with the other four winners he joins Wonka on a surreal tour through the fantasy land that is his factory.

Nostalgia:

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this was the first live-action (as in, non-Disney animated) musical that I ever saw. I say this because, while I’m sure that I saw Wizard of Oz while I was young, I have absolutely no memory of watching it, whereas I do have very concrete memories of seeing Willy Wonka as early as age 7. I don’t think I’ve seen it since the (rather terrible) Tim Burton remake came out in 2005, but I still remember pretty much all of the plot and major scenes.

Review:

This…is a really weird movie. It’s divided into two halves, which bear almost no resemblance to each other at all. And almost everything that anyone remembers is from the last forty minutes or so of the movie. However, I feel like that’s actually a strength of the movie. It’s as eccentric as its title character, and as Charlie says in the movie “and that’s not bad!”

Speaking of Willy Wonka, this is perhaps the definitive Gene Wilder performance. Sure, his collaborations with Mel Brooks resulted in some of the greatest comedies of all time, but whenever I picture Wilder in my head, he’s wearing a purple velvet frock coat. He has the perfect mix of playfulness and deadpan snark to pull off the role. Despite the fact that he doesn’t actually appear until halfway through the movie, Wilder dominates the screen from the moment he enters it. In fact, that entrance – in which he hobbles out onto the red carpet with a cane, slowly walks towards the crowd, before falling down and turning it into an athletic tumble – was actually Wilder’s idea in the first place. Although Charlie Bucket is the main character, and the book was in fact named Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, I feel that the movie’s name change was justified.

Being a musical, it helps to have songs that are actually memorable. And this one definitely has more than its share. I remembered every song in it but one (“Cheer Up Charlie”), and that one came back to me in full at the first line. “The Candy Man” was the song that was the pop hit at the time, but it’s Wonka’s song, “Pure Imagination,” that’s stuck in popular culture through the decades. An instrumental version of the song was used for the trailer to Ready Player One, despite being nearly a decade older than every other pop culture reference in the film, because it fits so well with the movie’s plot of “Willy Wonka, but a video game designer.”

The film is, of course, a morality play, with each of Charlie’s companions representing a different negative personality trait. This was very obvious to me even as a kid. What was less obvious was that Charlie himself represents one: envy. He’s first introduced staring longingly through a candy store window at all of the other kids enjoying treats that he can’t afford. He gets mocked by his teacher for not participating in the Golden Ticket contest, even though his lack of participation is not by choice, but rather an economic necessity for his family. And when he initially believes that the contest is over, he sinks into a depression, having defined his worth by his ability to win the contest and now believing himself to be even more of a failure than before. Unlike the other children, however, Charlie is actually able to conquer this trait. It is his personal sacrifice at the end, returning the Gobstopper to Wonka even though he could sell it for a lot of money, which ultimately wins him the contest.

In fact, the entire movie contains a whole lot of what TV Tropes calls “parental bonus.” Pretty much everything Wonka says contains a reference to a famous work of literature, something that most definitely went completely over my head as a child. I also missed a whole lot of the social satire of the first half of the movie, especially the innuendo of the computer programmer telling his machine “exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate” after it refuses to help him win the contest.

Finally, we have to bring up that boat sequence. Where the hell did that come from? I most definitely remembered it from way back. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone who saw this as a child didn't. It might be the most inexplicably terrifying sequence in an otherwise perfectly fine children’s film ever made. And I love it. Wilder’s increasingly frantic monologue, which ends with him screaming at the audience in a tight close-up, is the best single distillation of Wilder’s film persona. That none of the other actors were told about it in advance, and therefore gave perfectly realistic reactions, just makes the scene better.

Roald Dahl himself reportedly hated the adaptation, though reports differ somewhat on the degree of this dislike. Most of the disagreement seems to have hinged on the producers re-writing the script behind his back, which I guess is a reasonable complaint. He also hated “Pure Imagination,” however, which makes me less inclined to sympathize with his side. The adaptation also cleared up some of the very unfortunate racial aspects of the book, as the Oompa Loompas were originally written as explicitly African, which would make the already patronizing tone of Wonka’s “rescue” of them even more uncomfortable.

This is one of the key movies from my early childhood, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t be objective about it even if I tried. I have a niece who will be turning three in a couple weeks, and I’m looking forward to introducing her to it. I might wait another year or two, though. I don’t think she’s quite ready for the boat scene yet.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A

Stray Thoughts:

-“Pure Imagination” wasn’t even nominated for the Best Song Oscar that year. While I don’t think it would have beaten the Shaft theme, which won, it’s certainly better than three of the other nominees, none of which I think I’d ever heard before.

The Land Before Time

The Land Before Time (1988)

Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Gabriel Damon, Candace Hutson and Pat Hingle

[content warning: (dinosaur) children in peril, actual child death]

Plot:

A group of young dinosaurs, led by the Apatosaurus Littlefoot, are separated from their families by an earthquake.  Together they seek out the Great Valley, the only place remaining with abundant plant life, while attempting to avoid the predation of a hungry T. Rex.

Nostalgia:

While I’ve been told that The Black Cauldron was the first movie I ever saw in theaters, and I know I saw An American Tail as well, this is the first movie that I actually remember seeing in a movie theater.  I had a Littlefoot stuffed animal that I loved growing up, and watching this kicked off a several-year-long obsession with dinosaurs.

Review:

It’s probably been a quarter century since I’ve seen this movie in its entirely.  We probably sold the VHS in a garage sale some time in middle school, and I don’t even recall watching any scenes on Youtube or anything.  However, it’s so ingrained in my childhood that I found myself recognizing scene after scene as if it had only been a couple years at most since I’d watched it.

I’m well aware of Don Bluth’s reputation for producing dark children’s fare, and from what I remember of his three other big 80s movies (The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and especially All Dogs Go to Heaven) that’s a deserved reputation.  This movie isn’t really an exception, though I found that the antics of the young dinosaurs cut the darkness with significant levity in a way that I don’t remember from the other films.  While most of the movies have a single comic relief character (usually voiced by Dom DeLuise), all five of the main dinosaurs here take turns providing the physical comedy.  When you think about it, the concept of five dinosaurs, who may or may not be orphaned, who have to travel across a deserted, blasted landscape while being stalked by an enormous predator, is inherently dark and disturbing, so the extra humor to break the mood was actually quite appreciated.

The animation itself is simply gorgeous.  A relatively large part of the movie is dialogue-free, which allows even more emphasis to be placed on the artwork, especially all of the backgrounds.  This was also the first major dinosaur movie made after the 1970s renaissance in paleontology, and the animators clearly showed their work, at least up to the level of knowledge they had available in the mid-80s.  These clearly aren’t the swamp-dwelling, sluggish creatures of prior decades (and films), even if they do get a couple of dinosaurs from different periods mixed together.

I actually liked all of the vocal performances, even the “annoying” ones, and also appreciated the decision to leave Sharptooth the T. Rex unvoiced, as it’s just as much of a force of nature for Littlefoot and co. to overcome as any of the earthquakes and tar pits.  While on the subject, I do feel like I need to touch on the tragedy of Ducky, whose voice actress, Judith Barsi, would be murdered by her own father before the movie would come out in theaters.  I really can’t think of either this or All Dogs Go to Heaven without thinking of her (and if you’re not crying yet, Ducky’s “Yep Yep Yep” catchphrase is inscribed on her tombstone).

Another thing I’d completely forgotten about in the intervening decades was just how short this movie is.  Animated movies not produced by Pixar tend to be on the shorter end as is, but this movie was short even for most theatrical animation, barely making the 70 minute mark.  From what I’ve read, over ten minutes of completed animation had to be cut out of the movie to earn a G rating (this was a time when G was the expected rating for all animation.  The first Disney movie to get a PG rating, The Black Cauldron, had debuted only a couple of years earlier, and had bombed in part as a result).  This included fairly graphic sequences of Sharptooth mauling Littlefoot’s mother, a scene that remains in the movie only in the form of shadows against a wall.  Reportedly, Steven Spielberg himself, no stranger to child endangerment in his movies, told Don Bluth that he’d have “kids crying in the lobby” if he didn’t make the edits.  As far as I know, none of the removed footage has ever shown up on any print or home media release, but I’d love to see it if it ever became available.

Inexplicably, this rather dark, dangerous dinosaur journey would go on to spark a very long-running franchise of happy, bright direct-to-DVD animated musicals.  I wonder how many of the kids who grew up with those movies have ever gone back to watch the original, and been completely shocked by how different from them it is.  While it’s a little too slight for it to have a lot of rewatch value for me now, especially when compared to Bluth’s other 80s movies, I can still definitely appreciate the impact it had on me as a child.

Nostalgia: A

Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-I didn’t mention it above, but the score for the movie, composed by James Horner, is really quite excellent as well, and gets more of a spotlight than most scores due to the lack of dialogue in a lot of scenes.

-My favorite scene in the movie is actually the one scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the narrative.  For about two minutes, the movie comes to halt while we watch a group of small pteradons fight wordlessly over a cherry, until eventually another unrelated lizard saunters up and eats it.  They’re all dejected, until the mother shows up with a cherry for each of them.  Finally, as they’re walking away, they pass a depressed-looking Littlefoot, and one of them attempts to give their cherry to the dinosaur to cheer him up.  It feels like something out of the golden age of Disney animated shorts, and I found it positively charming.