Shane Watches a Bad Movie on Facebook with Friends: Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

1985 animated science fiction

Rating: 13/20 (Fred: 12/20; Josh: 11/20; Libby: 13/20, although she fell asleep; Carrie: technical difficulties)

Plot: Robots keep humans underground as mining slaves until one finds a magic sword hilt and pops up the surface to have a look around.

We wanted a bad animated flick for the Bad Movie Club this week, and although I was really pushing a Titanic cartoon on my friends [Note: A different Titanic cartoon than the one with the rapping dogs that I reviewed last year], they eventually decided on this one. I agreed because I had been accused of being a Bad Movie Club dictator and wanted to change that perception. Libby suggested it initially and fought hard to get everybody else on board. Then, of course, she fell asleep long before it was over.

I actually kind of liked the movie. The storytelling's a mess, and the titular hero--the Luke Skywalker of this Star Wars rip-off--is a little lame. The main baddie--the Darth Vader--isn't very compelling and never seems quite as intimidating as he should. I think it has more to do with his wardrobe choices than anything else. There are a ton of creative ideas, however, including these mandroids that search for body parts in a Dali-esque swampy landscape and a really cool spaceship--the Millennium Falcon of this movie. The action sequences, especially the little spaceship battles, are as confusing as they are well done, and there's even a scene in which a cigar-chomping character named Dag--the Han Solo of this movie--violates a female android by manipulating her butt circuits. Dag calls Orin a "little water snake"--kind of like how Han Solo calls Luke "kid" in the original trilogy--which made Josh decide that he's going to call me his "little water snake" at school next year which makes this barely effective teacher want to do something else for a career. There really were a lot of Star Wars parallels, but this also seemed to borrow from Masters of the Universe, Dune, Back to the Future (only because they were life vests like Marty), and Terminator. As mentioned, the story's got issues. There's a lot of meandering and too much of a blind kid, a character that leads to an ending detail that nearly ruined the entire movie. Oh, add the Gospels to things the makers of this borrowed from. I forgot that one. More annoying than the blind kid is a little fuzzy glowing thing--the Ewoks of this movie--that randomly save the universe a few too many times. So although there is some cool animated landscapes and nifty-looking characters, this is a little too much of a mess. Of course, I didn't watch this in 3D like I was supposed to, so maybe I'm missing out on the artistic genius. I did enjoy the score, a very synthy and cheesy 80's sound that had my toes tapping throughout the movie.

That poster up there is very misleading, by the way. That blind kid never rides a horse.

ParaNorman

2012 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 14/20; Emma: /20; Abbey: 18/20)

Plot: A boy who sees dead people inherits the job of reading a magic book to a centuries-dead witch from John Goodman, and along with his friends and sister, he's got to save the town from zombies.

Rapid Fire--Where Shane desperately tries to catch up and refuses to put much thought into this, write like a grown-up, or proofread himself.

Either I'm going nuts or there was a Manos: The Hands of Fate reference in this one. I really wanted to like it, and there are plenty of things to like. The creators have loads of creativity, there's a lot of fun visual humor, there's a visual style that keeps it from being just another one of those animated things, and Jon Brion does a nice job with the music. Then again, there's some crudeness and frightening imagery that made me wonder who the audience is, the humor in the dialogue doesn't work nearly as well as the visual stuff, the characters are really flat, and things just start looking stupid during a crazy climax. The story's weak. There's just not a lot of depth here, but this skims along entertainingly enough. It's darkly humorous and really probably not for children at all. Tim Burton fans might like it. The movie reminded me of him for a lot of reasons, not necessarily in a good way. Or is there a good way anymore?

The Corpse Bride

2005 animated love story

Rating: 14/20 (Becky: 18/20; Jen: 11/20 [slept through most of the movie]; Dylan: 11/20; Emma: 13/20; Abbey: 17/20)

Plot: Betrothed Victor and Victoria run into problems when the clumsy groom-to-be botches his lines during a wedding rehearsal. He retreats to the forest to work on his vows and accidentally marries the titular dead woman. Oh, snap! It's a weird love triangle.

This isn't a bad movie, but it's not exactly one that I connect with. I like the animation. A butterfly at the beginning is just showing off. A bird bunch, animated hair, a veil, billowing dust and smoke, tears, raindrops on windows. There are some really neat animated details, stuff that I'm not sure I've seen in stop animation before. I also really liked the way the camera moves through the miniature world, and the characters, though almost a little too strange and stylized, have these great facial expressions that give them a richness and personality. My favorite scenes are the ones in the land of the dead, a place which seems a lot livelier than the land of the living. Although I suppose that's the point. There's some fun visual humor and silly bits of darkness in those scenes though. Dependable Danny Elfman's incidental music is great, but the songs with lyrics mostly just pass the time. Yep, it's another musical for Family Movie Night. The plot's pretty thin here, and the movie would have been way too short without the songs. Ultimately, I want to like this one more than I actually do. There's just something missing, and I have trouble putting my finger on what it is.

Lady and the Tramp

1955 dog cartoon

Rating: 14/20 (Buster: 20/20)

Plot: A brown dog from a well-to-do neighborhood and a gray dog from the wrong side of the tracks meet and go on a date where they eat Italian food. Lucky for the streetwise gray dog, Lady's the type willing to put out on the first date. He spends the rest of the movie telling his pals, all representing a different racial stereotype, about how he "hit that."

How many perverts do you think walked into the theater to see this back in '55 because they thought it was going to be a movie about a couple lesbians?

This works as a love story. It doesn't work as a comedy. It is animated very well; I really like how all the animals--dogs, giraffes, the same beaver who's "not in the book" from the Winnie the Pooh movie, the other dogs--move around in this one. When this is focused just on the talking animals, this isn't too bad although it is a little boring. The humans get in the way a bit though. But this has to be Disney's most racist movie. Imagine the squirming that would take place if you watched this as part of a racial-diverse audience. It's also maybe Disney's most sexually-suggestive movie. It's all concealed from the kiddies, of course, but adults know exactly what's going down, from the scene where the other mutts are chasing down Lady because she's in heat to the pretty shot of the dogs silhouetted in front of a full moon where Tramp's about to get some. Doggy style. (Sorry, regular readers. I had to throw that in to lure more Googlers here.) This is a sweet enough little cartoon with far too many distractions. It's never been one I cared that much about.

The most famous scene in this movie, the one where the dogs eat spaghetti, reminds me of my date with Elizabeth in high school. There was a fat stereotypical Italian, and we both reached for the same spaghetti noodle with our mouths because this was a really cheap restaurant and they had run out of silverware. In the movie, the dogs [SPOILER ALERT] kiss. I just kept chewing and didn't realize my mistake until it was too late. Elizabeth had to have reconstructive surgery, and we never had a second date. I did not, if you're keeping score at home, hit that.

None of that is true, by the way. You know, in case you're keeping score at home. There was a girl named Elizabeth, but we never shared spaghetti. I also never even came close to chewing apart her face.

Disney movies, for whatever reason, bring out my raunchiness more than any other type of movie. (It's why The Little Mermaid is my most frequently visited blog post.) I wonder why that is. Should I talk to a psychologist about it?

The Emperor's New Groove

2000 movie where a David Spade character befriends a fat guy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The titular emperor, a young and arrogant spoiled brat, has plans to build a waterpark on a hill belonging to a gregarious peasant named Pacha. A power-hungry associate named Yzma attempts to assassinate Emperor Kuzco but winds up turning him into a talking llama instead. He has to depend on Pacha to get back to his kingdom and un-llama himself. It's a hilarious adventure!

Sure there' a midget Tom Jones in this, but other than his opening song, this isn't a musical. And thank God for that! This offering seems a little adventurous for the Disney folk. This one's got an ornery rhythm, and although there isn't anything objectionable, I imagine its general attitude might be off-putting to some parents. It's playful and as colorful as Robin Williams' squelchiest brain farts, but unlike his unhinged Genie, the modern references in this--boy scouts, exotic bird bingo--are never obvious. This is stuffed with visual gags, and the jokes in the dialogue are rapidfire, the funny coming so quickly that you really need to see this more than once to catch it all. So much contributes to this unique liveliness this cartoon's got. You've got the good voice work from the likes of sarcastic Spade ("He's doing his own theme music!") who, for at least part of the movie, narrates unreliably; John Goodman; freakin' Eartha Kitt as one of Disney's most inept villains ("Should have thought about that before you became a peasant."); Patrick Warburton as her even more inept sidekick, the rare dumbass character who doesn't get annoying by the end, a character whose every bit of dialogue is funny; even John "Piglet" Fiedler with one of his final roles, an Old Man cameo surrounded by movie after movie after movie in which he has to voice fucking Piglet. The action sequences, those scenes of adventure that must have been the reason this had a "mild peril" warning stamped on it, have both a zip and a wang. The sound effects accompanying all the mild peril were also great, giving this almost a Looney Tunes flavor--wacky and lively. The settings, a variety of gnarled locales with no regard for buzzkills like continuity, just pop, and I like the cool transitions from place to place and scene to scene. The whole movie's got a look that I liked a lot--the characters with exaggerated angles of necks and limbs, the jazzy movement, explosions of color. It's all very refreshing. Buster watched this with me and instantly wanted to watch it again. She was, however, high.

How to Train Your Dragon

2010 animated movie

Rating: 14/20 (Abbey: 20/20; Buster: ??/20)

Plot: An inventive but dorkish Viking, a boy who happens to be the son of the most famous and gifted dragon hunter on the island, wants to be a a dragon slayer himself. His name's Hiccup though, so it's unlikely. During a dragon raid, he manages to wound a Night Fury dragon, one of the scariest and most difficult to kill. They end up becoming first friends and later lovers causing Hiccup to question his people's hatred of the beasts.

I got bored with these characters, their story, and, strangest of all, the action sequences really quickly, but this one grew on me a little as it went. I never did like the main character, most likely because of his voice (Jay Baruchel), but Craig Ferguson almost made up for him. Astrid, the girl probably added in the script's second or third draft so that girls would have a reason to watch a movie about a bunch of boys and men fighting dragons, was arguably even more annoying. And I didn't like Toothless the dragon either. But for a movie with a bunch of characters I didn't care about or like, this wasn't that bad of a movie. That's mostly because of the animation which blows everything else I've seen from the Dreamworks people out of the water. The landscapes are terrific, the human characters are realistic without being overly realistic, and the textures of things like dragon skin, tables, clothing, fire, and the geography give this not only a realism but an artfulness. I really liked the look of the movie, just not the rest of it. Attempts to inject a little heart into this cartoon about dragons seemed really contrived, and even Buster rolled her eyes a few times. Yes, I did give this the customary Craig Ferguson bonus.

Titanic: The Legend Goes On...

2000 abomination

Rating: 2/20

Plot: Apparently, this is based on the true story of an actual boat called Titanic that ran into an iceberg and sank. Except this version has talking mice and rapping dogs.

I shit you not, dear readers! Rapping dogs. Not only are they rapping (poorly) on a ship that sank, oh, roughly sixty-seven years before rap music even existed (that's right, suckers, I'm throwing credit to "Rappers Delight" and the Sugarhill Gang), but they are doing their thing doggy style in front of a brick wall, a kind of wall I'm not sure they had on the RMS Titanic, that has a piece of paper with the words "rap music" written on it. This follows a classic line, perhaps a historically classic line but I'll have to do some research on the Titanic tragedy to know for sure, uttered by one of the mice: "If it wasn't for you, I would have ended up in somebody else's digestion!" One of the rapping dogs is carrying a boom box which I'm not sure was invented by 1912 either. I'm not sure how many people were in the room where this scene of the movie was planned and actually decided it was a good idea, but they might as well have gone down in one of those submarine things with James Cameron, found a few victims of the tragedy, brought them back to the surface, strapped them to an iceberg, and pointed and laughed at them. It would have been less offensive maybe, unless Celine Dion was invited. Speaking of her--there might be a song in this that is worse than that grating song from Cameron's little boat movie. I'll call it the "Yi yi yi ya ya, You're in My Blood, You're in My Blood" song. Actually, it's not only worse than the Celine Dion song (which I call "Goo La Doo La Gooly Doo")--it might be worse than the Titanic tragedy itself. This thing is poorly animated with out-of-proportioned characters, on-screen jitters, and stiff backgrounds. And most of the characters seem ripped from other movies--loads of Disney, Speedy Gonzalez, An American Tale, Home Alone maybe. Lots of stereotypes, too, the kind you just don't get to see much since they stopped showing the Warner Brothers cartoons. Appalachia, Jews, Mexican. The sound and translation work are equally embarrassing, with some lines not making much sense at all and some lines being repeated in this almost trippy way. It's bad in bewildering ways, probably (taking into account the tastelessness of the whole thing) the worst cartoon that I've ever seen.

Oprah Movie Club for March: Paprika

2006 anime

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 12/20)

Plot: Some fiend's stolen a dream machine, and it's up to a scientist and her titular alter-ego to save humanity. Or something like that. Honestly, I wasn't nearly smart enough to figure out what the hell was going on here.

But I liked what I was looking at! This stretches the elastic boundaries of what animation can do, dips deep inside the old noggin, scrambles things around, and leaves you baffled but aesthetically pleased. I thought the story was frustratingly incoherent, but that might not be the movie's fault. Then again, my brother's reasonably intelligent and was also confused, so maybe it was the movie's fault. He's not seen Inception, a film that seems to have borrowed a lot of this one's ideas--Jello floors, elevator rides through the subconscious, frog musicians. I have seen Inception which might have given me an advantage although I did have an extra obstacle in trying to avoid thinking about Leonardo Dicaprio. The guy's just dreamy. On second thought, I'm not sure there were frogs in Inception. I think part of the problem for me (and again, keep in mind that I'm a dumb guy) is that I had trouble understanding the motivations of most of the characters. There's a character we never really get to meet who befuddled me, and the villain's logic never really made much sense to me. But again, I did appreciate the manic creativity and goofy surrealism, and cartoon nudity always is good for a bonus point or two. I don't see how there could have possibly been enough room on a storyboard for all the ideas that show up on screen here. You get walking refrigerators, giant headed guys, butterfly girls, talking dolls, musical animals. The screen's just filled with this stuff, and even though a lot of the imagery was redundant, I looked forward to seeing that parade. As much as I enjoyed the cartoon visually, however, I hated it aurally. The soundtrack, other than the cute and unhinged parade music, was irritating. A lot of times, I watch a movie like this (Synecdoche, New York; anything from Czechoslovakia; You've Got Mail) and think that if I just watched it a second time, I'd understand it all a lot better. I think I could watch Paprika a dozen times and still not figure out what was going on.

OK, what other Oprah Movie Clubbers got a chance to see this one? What did you think?

When the Wind Blows

1986 cartoon

Rating: 17/20

Plot: An old couple prepare for nuclear holocaust by following the instructions in a government manual. It works fantastically!

I don't know this for sure and haven't researched, but I'm pretty sure the old dude is supposed to be Charlie Brown all grown up. I'm not sure why he develops an English accent though.

File this along with the devastating Grave of the Fireflies in the drawer marked "Cartoons That Might Make You Cry." Like Grave, this one shows how the violence of war affects everyday people, only this one's got a funny old retired couple instead of children. This one also isn't quite as devastating. I don't think. It's been so long since I saw Grave and I don't see myself popping it in again. The animation style is mostly very traditional and very simple; however, there are moments when it ventures into more experimental territory like during a dreamy dandelion sequence or some shots post-bomb. And I do really like how the "camera" moves through the old couple's house in this one. Watching the colorful--though muted--couple maneuver through the gray chaos after the war, like personified naivete wandering through a landscape of hate, makes for some unforgettable imagery. The writers and animators don't hold back--these characters cough up blood, lose their hair, develop festering boils, and soil themselves. It really clobbers you over the head with its point and toys with you emotionally, but I've got the kind of sensibilities that fall for this sort of thing. And even though the Cold War (in my opinion the most boring "war" we've ever had) is long gone, what this addresses is timeless and very very real. The sad truth at the heart of this movie--that old people are really pretty stupid--will unfortunately never go away.

A Christmas Carol

2009 Christmas horror movie

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 14/20; Dylan: dnf; Emma: dnf; Abbey: too terrified to finish)

Plot: An old guy mixes up his medication again and has a series of fever dreams and hallucinations that end with his obsessing over a crippled little boy. Merry Christmas!

I don't think Robert Zemeckis has a clue who his audience is. This isn't as terrifying as the ultra-creepy Polar Express movie (Shane trivia: That's the only movie that, since I was watching it on a plane, made me wish for a plane crash.) which is odd since this one has a lot of scenes that are supposed to be terrifying. It is scary though, so much that there's no way this would appeal to children. And it's a cartoon, a genre that a lot of adults have no interest in, so it's not really for adults either. So who's the audience for this thing? Speaking of the cartoonishness, I don't care for this kind of animation at all. I don't like the unnatural way the characters move while they have such a realistic look to them. I think it's that clash that makes this feel so cold and stiff and creepy. I did like how the camera moves, and being able to zoom beneath character's legs or through wreaths is almost enough reason for this story to be told yet again. The animated telling of the story allows for some different perspectives at least, and there's a liveliness to this version that only gets old at about the 2/3 mark. Zemeckis does a great job creating an animated London that effectively sets the mood for Scrooge's story, and the ghosts look pretty good. Well, Marley looks ghastly cool. The Ghost of Christmas Past is the wrong kind of creepy, and the Present one looks like it could be a Will Ferrell character. Dug the shadowy final ghost though. Overall, this just seems loud and extraneous, and far from the new Christmas classic I think Zemeckis is trying to make, it's not even one that I'll likely ever revisit again. Unlike Polar Express which I do periodically revisit in my darkest of nightmares.

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

2002 horse movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A cartoon horse runs around the prairie, is captured by a guy with a mustache, escapes with the help of a Native American, hooks up with a girl horse, and listens to Brian Adams' music obsessively.

Is it just me or does it seem like half the movies I write about on here are cartoons? This is another old-school flat-D animated feature that, like The Iron Giant, more people should have bothered seeing. Actually, I have no idea how this one did in the theaters or with its subsequent dvd release. I do remember it coming out and the commercials boasting that it had "more action than Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" which Dylan and I thought was pretty funny at the time. Spirit: Stallion of the Blah Blah Blah doesn't even have Yoda! This does have a lot of solid action scenes though, enough to make it a horsey movie that boys would probably like. Vibrant music and animation perfecting capturing the American West circa when we was killin' all the Indians make this fun for both the eyes and ears, and I liked seeing the historical fiction narrative through the eyes of a horse. I liked the protagonist, voiced hunkily by Matt Damon back when he was skinny. Honestly though, one more Brian Adams song, and I would have left the house to find a horse to kick as hard as I could. This has a nice lively story with good themes for both the little ones and their parents. Dumb title though. It probably failed at the box office because nobody wanted to ask for tickets to see something called Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Winnie the Pooh

2011 cartoon

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 13/20; Emma: 19/20; Abbey: 20/20; Sophie: too young to rate movies, especially ones this explicit)

Plot: Pooh wants honey, Eeyore's lost his tael, and Owl's got everybody convinced that a terrifying creature called a Backsoon has kidnapped Christopher Robin. It's just another afternoon in the bedroom of a terminally deranged young English boy. You just know that in a future sequel, Owl and Rabbit are going to convince him to start his classmates and/or parents. Actually, where are his parents in these movies? Somebody better check the freezer!

This is not your parents' Winnie the Pooh cartoon! No, in this one, Pooh Bear is disemboweled in what has to be the most horrifyingly grotesque scene this side of one of those Saw movies. Actually, this isn't a carbon copy of the older Disney Pooh material at all. It shares a love for childlike songs, endearingly simple and nostalgic animated backgrounds and characters, a wonderful playfulness, and sweet little stories. It actually does some things better than the original. It blends its stories, some from Milne's text and some created specially for this, really well, perfect for the no-attention-span of modern kiddos. The 2D animation doesn't look as flat as the characters weave in and out of their settings. And this is a whole lot funnier than the original with some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. This new Pooh's got a wackier tone that is different from its predecessor while not disrespecting the previous stories or its source material. (It should be noted that my wife, a Pooh aficionado, did seem offended by a lot of the goings-on here.) I also really liked the voicework despite having to initially get used to the slightly-different-sounding character voices. Some guy named Jim Cummings, an actor with a resume packed with versatile voice acting roles, does both Pooh and Tigger. We recognized Bud Luckey, the depressed clown in Toy Story 3, as (of course) Eeyore. Luckey's more of an animator than an actor, but he could make a career out of voicing depressed characters. Checking imdb.com, it looks like he's got a handful of roles on the animated horizon--suicidal monkey, despondent puppet, moody Amish guy, heartbroken octopus. One of my favorite people, Craig Ferguson, is perfect as Owl, and John Cleese should win some kind of award for not making me miss Sebastian Cabot. I didn't care much for the songs in this one although there were some clever lyrics. Pooh's a briskly-paced barely hour-long breezy flick that's great for young children and funny enough for older ones. And it might help Disney make a buttload of money with children's clothes and stuffed animals, so everybody wins!

The Iron Giant

1999 giant robot movie

Rating: 17/20 (Dylan: 12/20; Emma: 6/20; Abbey: 16/20)

Plot: Hogarth finds a new large metallic buddy one day. Unfortunately, the government wants to destroy him. With the help of a guy who owns a junkyard, he tries to keep a monstrous hunk of metal that is impossible to hide hidden.

Brad Bird's second best movie, The Iron Giant is a humorous and ultimately touching E.T. clone that succeeds on almost every level. I did have to deduct points for the lame Superman reference at the end though because it was just too much. The 1950s are captured perfectly with beautiful animation. I especially like the way the titular robot contrasts with nature, the visuals contributing to a theme, I guess. There are shots that, although maybe not as beautiful as some recent CGI-shots, are almost frameworthy. The giant itself is a sympathetic character. You can identify with him even though he's not a human character both as he struggles with identity and has tanks shooting at him. Of course, he is an anthropomorphized robot, the kind you can only get in a cartoon. This is a simple story animated simply with a great score and hardly a single wasted moment. It's a great last splash of 2D wonder before computer animation would completely take over.

John Mahoney's also got a part in this. I knew a guy who was in a movie with John Mahoney who was Frasier's dad. And Kevin Bacon was in an episode of Frasier which means there are only four degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and me.

Shrek the Third

2007 sequel

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Shrek doesn't want to be the next king, so he and his friends travel to locate a true heir to the throne. Meanwhile, Prince Charming is still ticked off after the last movie failed to end the way he wanted it to, and he attempts to take over the throne himself. Oh, snap!

Well, they're just going through the motions now. I lost interest in the plot of this one almost right off the bat, and the characters, none of which I actually like at all, are even more grating here than they are in the first movie. There's not a single laugh to be had here, and the novelty that makes the first movie tolerable is almost completely gone. It's replaced with the reverberating sound of a cash register actually. I wish Dreamworks would grow a pair and kill a couple of these characters off. Pinocchio? Have him sawed in half? Gingerbread Man? Didn't he have his legs bitten off in the first movie? You know what else Dreamworks gets wrong here? There's a scene where a character actually does die, and they stomp all over it with halfassed humor. Then, they have a funeral scene where I'm actually supposed to be sad. In the fifteen minutes when this is all going on, they manhandle both emotions and leave me wondering why they even bothered. Why didn't they just have Shrek fart in Donkey's face for fifteen minutes instead? Pop songs, general loudness, allusions that aren't as clever as anybody thinks they are. This is just tired. They made a fourth one of these?

I've always wondered. You know how foreign countries translate the names of American movies and they sometimes turn out kind of funny? I wonder if this one is translated as Farting Moody Monster in Vietnam or somewhere? Somebody research that for me.

Aladdin

1992 Disney cartoon

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A lengthy public service announcement in the French symbolist tradition about how teenagers should, instead of engaging in premarital sex, pleasure themselves. Aladdin grows tired of rubbing his lamp and getting his genie all over the place and decides to try to get in Jasmine's pants. After all, she seems willing with those little half shirt things and not even attempting to hide her pussycat. Eventually, Aladdin's "snake" gets loose and havoc is wreaked.

Seriously, Disney was so subconsciously dirty during this period (see Little Mermaid). Look at the symbols: soaring towers, water (female genitalia symbol according to most dream symbolism books), snakes, phallic genies with pubic beards, lamps being rubbed until they ejaculate, magic carpet rides (so that's what the kids are calling it these days?), a monkey transforming into an elephant (a boy's first erection?). Sick stuff, Mickey.

If you want a great animated feature with Aladdin in it, try The Adventures of Prince Achmed. If you want something a lot louder and a lot more colorful, go for Disney's Aladdin. This really is an entertaining Disney feature with a lot of fun visual gags and some really good songs. It rips off Superman's flight through the city with a magic carpet ride only Aladdin doesn't try to guess the color of Jasmine's underpants. (Or just pants as the say in some parts of the world.) Robin Williams' manic voice work is fun the first time you watch this, but subsequent viewings show you that he's just stomping all over the production. Still, it adds a spunk to what otherwise might have been a same-old/same-old version of this story. I liked Jafar as a villain when he was talking to Gilbert Gottfried and messing up Prince Abooboo's name, but when he turns into a genie at the end and starts making a series of puns that would make C3PO groan, it became clear that this script needed some editing. OK, I'm going to ask you to pause so that you can fully appreciate what I did with the C3PO reference there. I want you to let that want sink in a bit. Part of Disney's appeal is that they're able to take stories that are thousands of years old, inject them with some life, and transform them into something new. Despite a lot of annoyances that get in the way of this being really great, they do a good job with that. One thing I do like about this one compared to most Disney princess/prince movies: the romance is between a pair of well-developed characters rather than one developed character and a prop. Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty have a princess and a guy who might as well be a life-sized cardboard cut-out of a prince. Beauty and the Beast and this at least make the prince characters real, probably because they're titular. But my question: Is Aladdin really all that likable? Jafar's considered the bad guy because he's evil and all, but Aladdin is the one whose deceit causes all the problems anyway. As I say with a lot of Disney protagonists, kids could learn a lot more life lessons if Aladdin would have been punished in the end.

Idiots and Angels

2008 adult cartoon

Rating: 16/20

Plot: He goes to work, he's mean to people, and he hangs out at the local bar where he lusts after the owner's wife. And that's about it for our protagonist until he wakes up one morning to discover wings growing on his back. They seem to have an effect on him--making him do good--so he desperately tries to get rid of them. Others try to figure out ways to exploit the wings for profit.

Easily my favorite Bill Plympton feature. Or featurette for that matter. See the color on the poster? Those are pretty much the colors you get throughout the film, but they're beautiful grays and they work well with the dream-like nature of the strange, Bukowski-esque plot, helping to set a definite tone and bringing a focus on the character and his flighty plight. I don't think there are any spoken words, just sound effects and a soundtrack provided by Pink Martini and Tom Waits. But there's still a lot of dark humor featuring the artist's usual shape-shifting characters who we get to spy on at their humorously lowest lows. Regardless of what I generally say about Plymptoons, I do like the way he animates character movement, and here, they move through his typically bleak settings in grossly poetic ways. Plympton's surreal hand-drawn animations are often very ugly, appropriately as ugly as human beings, and whereas I usually think they work better in small doses, this one just connects. I'll have to reread Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" to find parallels.

The Spongebob Squarepants Movie

2004 cartoon

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Somebody's stolen King Neptune's crown, and it's up to Spongebob Squarepants and Patrick to save the day.

This movie doesn't try to do anything that the television show doesn't do which is probably why you'd call it successful. The animation retains the simple old-school style with little-to-no setting details but with a manic creativity that makes up for it. I don't like the Spongebob characters as much as most people it seems, and just like the little fifteen minute stories that you get on the tube, I lost interest pretty quickly into this one and didn't perk up again until David Hasselhoff's nipples made a cameo appearance. Spongebob just doesn't do much for me which begs the question once again: What am I missing here? Why do so many people around my age dig this show? Is pot required?

By the way, during the squid-guy-taking-a-shower scene (hot, by the way), I'm pretty sure there was a Frogs' song hummed. That's awesome! And there's a Ween song at the end, so it's got that going for it. And I had to give this a five point Jeffrey Tambor bonus. And Alec Baldwin's in it.

Rio

2011 animated bird movie

Rating: 12/20 (Abbey: 1/20; Emma 1/20; Sophie: ?/20)

Plot: Jesse Eisenbird, a librarian's pet macaw, wants desperately to get laid, so he travels to the titular city of sin to find himself a feathered whore. He meets a hot little blue number named Jewel and winds up talon-cuffed to her after a kinky sex act gone wrong. Smugglers are after them, and flightless Eisenbird has to learn to adapt to a harsh new existence in the wild while trying to find his librarian friend.

During a mating sequence, the ornithologist naturally plays Lionel Richie's "Say You, Say Me" because "Lionel Richie works every time." Love that. I also liked the colorful and musically vibrant beginning sequence that opened this movie. Rio de Janeiro provides a lively backdrop to the goings-on in this cartoon from the makers of Ice Age. As seen in Ice Age, those animators know how to create moods with setting details. This covers pretty much everything you'd expect a movie taking place in Brazil to cover--soccer, slum life, colorful parades. Unfortunately, I had a difficult time liking this movie for very long despite my love for both birds and color. I enjoyed most of the voice talent, especially Jemaine Clement and (ahem) Jesse Eisenberg, but I had a tough time connecting with the characters. Especially the human ones. I didn't like how the CGI people looked in this movie, and the human characters all looked like they were overacting. There are also a lot of songs in this, extraneous songs that do nothing more than make the movie seem way too long. The movies got some jokes that the kiddies might enjoy, and a lot of action sequences that zip by very quickly (admittedly, ones that are animated really well), but I'm not sure there's much for adults to appreciate in this one. Watch Rango instead.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #17: Astroboy

2009 cartoon

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Robot scientist Nicolas Cage's son dies, so he makes a robot version to replace him. It doesn't work out nearly as well as you would think.

Life is short, and I wasted part of it watching Astroboy. I got really bored early, fought to keep my mind from wandering, and ended up liking next to nothing about this movie. I liked the part where the kid died, I guess. Apologies to anybody who really wants to read my detailed thoughts on Astroboy, but I can't waste any more time with it.

Rango

2011 animated Western comedy

Rating: 16/20 (Emma: ?/20; Abbey: 13/20)

Plot: A Chameleon with No Name (well, actually he does have a name) is accidentally abandoned by his human family. The desert he winds up in is not the safest of places, and the Wild West style animal town called Dirt he eventually stumbles into is probably even less safe. He exaggerates his prowess, lucks his way through a fight with a troublesome bird, and ends up the new sheriff of Dirt. He tries to get to the bottom of the town's lack of water.

Well, I like quirky animated movies with talking animals and spaghetti Westerns, and I seem to like a lot of what Gore Verbinski does (the underrated Mousehunt, The Weather Man featuring our summer star Nicolas Cage, that first Pirate movie). Previews for this made it look really good, too. So I wasn't entirely surprised that this is actually really good. It's really got the whole spaghetti vibe down with the wonderfully withered town of Dirt and the ugliest collection of characters you're likely to see. Some grizzled voice work (Ned Beatty should be in every animated movie; it should be a new law or something) gives them personality and color, and although there's not really all that much character development with any of them other than the titular chameleon, they work really well to give the setting the texture it needs. I really like the animation in this. There's a great blend of natural and realistic settings with these strange looking cartoonish animals, and the action scenes have this frenetic energy but still somehow make sense. There are lots of nods, predictably, to Western greats, but this also has a Hunter S. Thompson spotting which I thought was an awesome touch. That, and the protagonist is supposedly modeled after Don Knotts, probably meaning that I should go ahead and give this a Don Knotts bonus point. Oh, and similar to the movie Keoma that I just reviewed, there's an owl mariachi band in this that sings a bunch of songs about what's going on with the plot and how Rango is probably going to die. They work a lot better than the drunken pair in Keoma though. This works as an action movie, a kids movie (actually, maybe not), a Western, a comedy. It's not flawless--the plot's a little sloppy--but it's a wonderful hour-and-a-half of entertainment and definitely something I'd not mind watching over and over if any of my kids had actually liked it. My rating would probably go up, too.