Category: Musings

Reflections: Dragonslayer (1981)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover for a DVD release of the 1981 movie Dragonslayer, showing a dragon flying in the upper right corner and the hero crouching with spear and shield in the lower left corner
Cover of one DVD release of Dragonslayer

1. Movie Background
Dragonslayer is one of those movies you know was made before the PG-13 rating existed, because there’s no way it would’ve gotten a simple PG otherwise. On the other hand, the more-than-PG material isn’t a large portion of the movie, so the studio might’ve chosen to simply trim out some shots to secure a PG and keep the younger audience dollars intact. (And it’s not so much the main dragon fight as the underwater semi-nudity and a sprinkling of gore, since action violence gets more allowance than other non-child content.)

Offhand, I don’t know what made a movie studio put out a sword-and-sorcery fantasy film in 1981. (It wasn’t made in response to Clash of the Titans, because the two movies would’ve been in production at the same time.) Star Wars and its many coattail-riders were still the big thing, not castles and dragons and wizards. I don’t know when Dungeons and Dragons began its 1980s rise, but Dragonslayer did come out before the D&D cartoon and action figures, and also before He-Man.

Then again, there’s Thundarr the Barbarian and Blackstar. IMDB tells me Thundarr was around in 1980 and Blackstar started airing in late 1981. (I thought Blackstar was later, but I guess I won’t argue.) So there was something going on with entertainment in this area.

(Also, an extra nod to Blackstar, a mainstream Saturday-morning cartoon whose hero was specifically identified as a Native American and whose heritage wasn’t, to my memory, played for stereotypes. All the way back then.)

2. The Nostalgic Part
I saw this movie in the theater. I have a suspicion my mother would not have allowed that if she’d known what all was in it. Somehow instead of being frightened by the scary stuff I was fascinated and really enjoyed it. I do remember, though, that at the part where the two leads end up swimming together and the big revelation ensues, I didn’t understand what was going on and had to ask. Watching it now the visuals are clear enough, but either I blinked or I was simply less attuned to the different curvatures of human sexes. (This scene is not wildly explicit, but it’s not especially vague either.) When I first saw it, I didn’t understand why the character had been pretending, but I didn’t worry about it.

I remember playing Dragonslayer in the back yard, crouching down with a make-believe shield and imagining the giant dragon above me ready to breathe down fire.

I also remember, though, my utterly unreasonable prejudice against the hero’s short, curly hair. It just seemed frivolous. Heroes weren’t supposed to have hair like that, in my mind.

3. Points of Interest
By and large, the moviemakers didn’t try to show more than they knew their special effects crew could manage. Compared to Clash of the Titans, this movie is less ambitious, and therefore more visually convincing. It helps, of course, that the dragon is mostly seen in dark, tight caves or flying in the distance at night. In fact the cave scenes are quite effective in showing the menace of this creature in a way that the Kraken fight did not. An effect I especially liked was the sheets of flame moving across the surface of a lake, which I’m guessing was done with simple gasoline but looks great.

There’s a virgin sacrifice who does not stand trembling with shrieks or weeping, or even pleading, but actively fights to get loose and escape. Working resolutely before the dragon appears, she bloodies her hands and wrists to get loose from her manacles, and even when the creature approaches doesn’t scream until she’s actually lifted into the air. There would be nothing wrong with screaming in her situation, but the filmmakers’ choice to have this minor, unnamed character act with fierce determination instead of the conventional helpless-victim routine deserves extra appreciation.

While we’re on the subject, we see another young woman sacrificed, and she is there through her own courage and moral sense of justice. Even when she’s freed she boldly steps forward to go on and meet this fate—knowing what will happen to her, but accepting it because she believes this will save the kingdom and running would make things worse for everyone. She doesn’t need to die, but her reasons aren’t stupid.

Like those two, the female lead of the story is, throughout, courageous and bold and determined. These three are the only women who stay on camera more than five seconds, but they display their bravery despite a scenario in which screaming, wailing, or cowering would be the more typical movie portrayal. They aren’t helpless or passive or mere objects: they have agency and they use it, whether the effort succeeds or not.

Including a Christian priest seems like a setup for a cheap swipe at religion . . . and in some ways it is, eventually . . . but all the same he shows himself to be steadfast and faithful, not a hypocrite or a punchline like I was expecting.

In the middle of the movie there’s a scene where the unlikable villain-esque king condemns the hero as a self-appointed savior who has meddled in things without any idea what the consequences will be. The king is the bad guy of the movie, second to the dragon, but in this speech he is entirely and utterly correct in what he says about the hero. And events prove him right.

At one point the female lead tells the hero, in essence, “We failed. We’d better just leave town before things get worse.” And the hero . . . agrees. Off they go. The movie won’t be complete unless they eventually turn back, but when she brings it up there are no arguments about abandoning other people or running away from the mess you made or unfairness to anyone else, just the acknowledgment that circumstances are terrible and it would be very impractical to stick around. This is unusual for an action hero.

Dragonslayer fundamentally takes itself seriously, as a movie should if it means to frighten you with a deadly dragon. Unusually, it treats sacrificial maidens as being real people, not just screaming audience-bait. There’s a good bit of humor mixed in, but it’s basically in the things characters say (along with a bit of satire at the end aimed at kingly pretension), while the events and actions are treated as bearing real costs and consequences, resulting in significant danger when people make the wrong decisions. Maybe the movie didn’t need quite so much engagement with the baby dragons, though.

Reflections: Turning Red (2022)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment

SPOILER alert: I don’t normally bother with spoiler warnings, but this movie is fresh in the world, unlike most of the things I write about, so be aware that I’m writing as if the reader has already seen the film and knows all the turns the plot takes.

Great stories carry universal themes within the vessel of a specific, closely defined context. One thing such stories do is allow you to connect with one aspect of what’s happening while learning about other aspects you’re less familiar with.

There can be multiple themes in one story, and Turning Red isn’t “about” only one thing. It’s about:

• allowing yourself to feel and to express your own emotions, when other people don’t want you to

• friendship as the nest of comfort encasing you so you are safe to experience difficult feelings

• inter-generational trauma

• puberty

• the cost of hiding things from your children that they are going to have to deal with, whether those are biological realities or family history or something else

• guilt and shame, and the dangers of burying them

• the painful process of separating from your parents as you grow older

• children struggling to protect the emotional well-being of their parents

• going overboard and taking things too far while trying to protect someone you love

• family coming together, or staying together, despite conflicts

• mother-daughter dynamics specific to Chinese culture and how those dynamics interact with a Western cultural environment

• people turning into adorable fluffy talking animals

As a viewer you probably won’t relate to every one of those things, in the sense of having gone through them yourself, but that’s okay. Most people will recognize several of those concerns from their own lives or the lives of those they care about, although the experiences won’t match precisely.

The closer you are to the context portrayed in the film—being a 13-year-old-girl of Cantonese-speaking Chinese heritage growing up in a temple in Toronto in 2002—the more you might find in the film that resonates with your life, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is left out. You can still connect to Meilin and her emotions despite differences in biographical data, just like you can read and appreciate Oliver Twist without ever having been an orphaned English boy with possible family secrets growing up in the slums of Victorian-era London under the malevolent eye of a master pickpocket.

Why “Turning Red”? Why a red panda?

As the film points out, in Chinese culture red means good luck. In Western culture, red often means anger. (It can also mean blushing.) In plenty of cultures red suggests blood, and in this movie it’s impossible to ignore the connection to menstrual blood. (Notice Meilin’s mother using the euphemism “red peony.”)

Oh, right—we also use red to symbolize sexual desire.

The red panda isn’t simply a metaphor for menstruation or puberty. Or simply a metaphor for uncontrolled anger (and other feelings). It’s some of both, and it’s also lucky, providing the means for Meilin to get free of emotional quicksand, and we are reminded more than once that the ability to change into a red panda was supposed to be a blessing, not a curse.

(But there again we run into a menstruation euphemism, this time Western, referring to it as “the curse” when it doesn’t have to be viewed as one.)

A lot of filmmakers would’ve made the main character a loner or given her just a single friend. Not only is Meilin part of a crew, but her friends are the very reason she can manage her inner panda so well.

One suspects her mother did not have close friends when this was happening to her.

So far I’ve only seen Turning Red once, and I don’t remember how specific the film is about when Meilin’s mother first turned panda, or even if she only changed once (when the incident occurred).

But:
– When we see her in the bamboo forest she looks older than Meilin.
– Her parents are surprised this happened to Meilin this young, so much so that her mother’s first response is “period” and not “panda.” (If we accept this as more than just a movie trick to make the eventual reveal more surprising.)
– We know that when she went feral she was already seriously dating her future husband.

It may be that her inner panda is SO much bigger and SO much more destructive than Meilin’s because she kept it in too long, steadfastly suppressing her feelings because she refused to push back against her mother’s grip. (Until.)

Meilin, though, is younger when she first allows herself to have a conflict with her mother, and therefore her panda emerges earlier in her life.

Let’s not forget that the red panda was given to women of this family to act as a defense. Its very existence is explicitly defined as a way to protect the family from harm, and that includes protecting yourself.

It’s sad that Meilin’s grandmother and aunties feel the need to seal their panda sides away again, but it’s not a mixed message. These women have spent the vast majority of their lives with those red panda spirits locked away, and they simply lack the means to cope with them in day to day living. Just “learning a valuable lesson” isn’t enough to address that.

That is not to say it’s too late for the grandmother and aunties, only that if they want to integrate their inner pandas it’s going to be a gradual process and they’ll need slow, steady adjustments to reach a point where they can handle it. Not merely “Meilin showed us the way so now it’s easy!” I deeply respect the filmmakers’ choice to stick with the reality of people’s capacity to change rather than taking the happier ending.

It is essential to Turning Red that Meilin had her friends before she had a secret. Not because those girls wouldn’t have been able to move beyond the weirdness and get to know her, but because she would not have been able to give herself to them while trying to hold that secret inside.

There’s a moment in the film that would’ve been the emotional climax or major turning point in many other movies: Meilin goes to the party in the cardboard panda suit, and the crowd doesn’t like her. She has to turn into the real fluffy panda before the other kids care. Obviously this will spark Meilin’s moment of realization: “They don’t want me, none of this popularity is about who I am, it’s all about the panda, it’s fake and shallow and I can’t believe I thought they liked me!” Right?

Nope. In Turning Red this isn’t even a ripple on the water. There are bigger fish to catch, thematically; and popularity and acceptance by the larger group has never been Meilin’s goal. Think about that: a movie about a thirteen-year-old that gives her sudden access to broad popularity for the first time, and while she’s certainly enjoying it, it isn’t what matters to her.

And when, in Miriam’s words, she throws her friends under the bus, it’s not because she forgot them while chasing social glories (teen story plot #302); she does it because she’s afraid of/doesn’t want to disappoint her mother. This is a critical distinction in the direction and focus of Turning Red.

On the subject of whether Turning Red is a “realistic” portrayal of thirteen-year-olds, I have two observations.

1. In real life, Meilin’s drawings of Daisy Mart Devon would probably have been made over two or three days, not all in one steamy evening. But this is a movie and they have less than two hours to tell the whole story, so they’ve condensed things a little.

2. When Meilin and Tyler see each other again at the concert, the first time since she attacked him, I don’t understand why he has no particular reaction. Whatever apology her mother would’ve made her recite at the end of the party would not be enough. We did avoid the lying macho bravado of “What? I wasn’t really scared!” and I would thank the filmmakers for that if they had given us something else instead. But I saw nothing, not even a glare from him. Tyler gets pulled into the group, Meilin reappears, and he’s happy and easy-going. That part doesn’t feel quite right. (Maybe I overlooked something I’ll notice the next time I watch it?)

The one criticism of the movie I’ve seen that has any standing is that “it constantly uses Black culture but has no Black main characters.” The historical reality is that back in 2002 and before, white boy bands were shamelessly appropriating dance moves, hand gestures, clothing styles, speech patterns, and slang that came from Black communities. (To what degree Latinx communities contributed I don’t know enough to say.) Turning Red reflects that reality, and it would be unfair to blame the film for the actual cultural theft. It also seems pretty true to life that the teenage characters would not be aware of this as being appropriation: to them it’s “boy band culture” and they haven’t reflected on it more deeply that that, because most non-Black kids at the time probably didn’t.

Still, “that’s how it was” is not enough to wash away all of a movie’s responsibility on a subject. When you’re creating a fictional story, you don’t have to faithfully reproduce every single aspect of the time period you’re looking at. After all, the filmmakers proudly stepped forward to offer us a boy band 8000% more diverse and inclusive than the ones that actually existed. Indeed one of the band members, the one our protagonist is most obsessed with, who therefore gets the most screen time, is Black. Even if you think that’s not enough, it should not be overlooked.

Should the film have done more to balance its use of appropriated Black cultural elements? Possibly. How much responsibility does it bear for addressing a situation it reflects but did not create? I’m not sure. Some.

I’m not clear on what the answer should be, but I do see there’s a valid question here.

This is one of my favorite Pixar films. And I’ve never even been to Toronto.

Reflections: Clash of the Titans (1981)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the blu-ray for the movie Clash of the Titans (1981), showing a large Perseus aiming a sword, with Medusa aiming her bow in the lower left corner and Pegasus flying in the lower right corner

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Release the kraken!” in an imposing voice, you can thank this movie.

The Nostalgic Part
I saw this movie as a child when it was originally released. My siblings and I had the action figures, even though the toy company made Perseus look mean and unappealing. But, I mean, Calibos! How could you resist a figure like that? (Though I don’t think my mom was too comfortable with it.) Sadly, in our household we never had the Kraken toy, which was awesome-looking.

For many, many people of my generation, this movie was a spark that got us interested in Greek mythology. Even if it got things wrong, it made us care about the stories.

The Mythological Background
First, we have to get this out of the way:

1. A kraken is actually a giant squid, and comes from Northern European legends, not Greek myth. The Perseus of myth did face a sea monster, however. (In Greek it was labeled as a kétos, a generic term that could include giant fish and whales as well as unspecified menacing sea creatures.)

2. Perseus did not ride on Pegasus; Bellerophon did, when fighting the Chimaira. Perseus had winged sandals to keep him in the air. Pegasus is connected to Perseus, however, since the winged horse reportedly sprang from the neck of Medusa when Perseus decapitated her.

3. Pegasus is a Greek word, not a Roman one, and if you’re going to be pedantic, the proper plural is pegasoi (not pegasi) and you ought to be spelling the singular pegasos or pégasos in the first place.

4. The Titans were a specific group of beings in Greek myth; Medusa wasn’t one of them, and neither was the sea monster that threatened Andromeda.

Next, some other mythological tidbits:

A. Medusa had two sisters, and all three were referred to as Gorgons, although “the Gorgon” would usually mean Medusa. The tradition is a little unclear about whether all three could kill people with a look, and in some accounts Medusa was mortal and the other two were immortal, though all three were daughters of the same two primal deities.

B. In the original stories, there was a king who wanted to marry Perseus’s mother, and Perseus said something careless to him about getting the Gorgon’s head. Unexpectedly the king took him up on it, saying, “Okay, bring it to me.” More unexpectedly, Perseus did so.

C. Curiously, the earliest Greek sources for the Perseus story seem to assume he used a sickle, not Medusa’s head, to defeat the sea monster. The head was a way to kill his human enemies, not a giant creature.

D. Mythology says Andromeda’s mother got the kingdom cursed with a sea monster by claiming to be more beautiful than the Nereids (a group of sea divinities). The movie changes this to the mother saying Andromeda was more beautiful than Thetis (who in myth was one of the Nereids and also the mother of Achilleus).

The Movie
Although the movie doesn’t stay faithful to the original myths, there is nevertheless some good storytelling here. It doesn’t just throw in bits of myth at random, hoping to “look cool,” it uses those elements to create obstacles for the hero to overcome and add complexity to the story.

Focusing on Thetis, instead of a group of Nereids, makes the plot and character motivations easier to follow and relate to.

Making Andromeda the subject of the “more beautiful” boast creates an obvious reason why the daughter, not the mother who makes the boast, is the one being sacrificed.

Calibos is an invention of the movie, but he makes a good villain, and it’s useful to have a human-but-slightly-inhuman antagonist to mess things up so Perseus doesn’t get by too easily. (Calibos is probably inspired by actual-myth-character Phineus, who had been promised Andromeda and therefore hated Perseus, but he was totally human and wasn’t much of a challenge.)

A little thing like saying Calibos’s worst crime was wiping out all the winged horses except Pegasus helps explain why Calibos finds it so easy to trap Pegasus when Perseus struggled to do so: Calibos is an old hand at this. It also provides an unstated reason why he doesn’t simply kill Pegasus outright: having already been turned into a semi-creature for slaughtering winged horses, he’s not going to risk killing the last one and getting cursed even more horribly. We can assume that he plans to release Pegasus once the immediate crisis is over and figures Zeus won’t throw any thunderbolts just for pinning the animal in a cage a few days.

The early sequence of Argos being destroyed is pretty strong stuff, despite the easy-to-spot superimposed images.

Giving Zeus a little theatre model with clay figures of people has no basis in myth that I’m aware of, but it’s a great device for the movie.

Yes, the special effects look dated and often clumsy. There was no CGI back then, and everything was done in-camera or with superimposed images or with stop-motion miniatures. This may be peak Harryhausen, though. Clay Calibos’s head is too big, but Medusa and the Kraken look quite impressive for what they are.

Other Thoughts
Perseus is an idiot for not retrieving his sword near the end. Come on, this is not a helmet lost in the swamp. The sword is right there. Just because someone’s impaled on the blade is no reason not to get it back.

Charon doesn’t belong in this story at all, but he is just the right kind of creepy and adds an extra tone of menace to the approach to Medusa. I do wonder how Perseus paid the fare to get back, though.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence how the Kraken has an ape-like face so he can look like a certain other movie monster when he reaches out a gigantic hand to take hold of the woman chained up as a sacrifice?

Much of my information on actual Greek myths is derived from Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1-volume hardback 1993 / 2-volume paperback 1996).

Reflections: Galaxy Express 999 (1979 film)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
cover to the blu-ray of the 1979 movie Galaxy Express 999

“Being human means you have to die, whether you’ve lived out your dreams or not.”

1. Nostalgia
Galaxy Express 999 was one of my early experiences with Japanese animation, back in the days before anime was a familiar term in the U.S. I saw it (in an edited English version) after Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, and Star Blazers, but probably before Robotech. I think it was before my sister and I saw the Toei Little Mermaid, but we watched it on VHS, so VCRs were available.

The biggest impression it made on me back then, in the early 1980s, was the mingled sense of fascination and horror at the whole idea of giving up your body for an artificial one, and, worse, of being physically transformed into a piece of equipment, consciously but helplessly living for years as a nut or bolt in a gigantic machine. The movie does a poor job of explaining exactly how that was meant to function, but it definitely communicated to young me a quiet, creepy shock of disembodiment, powerlessness, and the remorse of doing something terrible to yourself you could not undo.

There was also the visceral pain of the idea of someone murdering your mother and then setting up her body as a trophy: grief mixed with added outrage over the callousness, the indignity, and the inhumanity of the killers.

2. Practical Background
A few days ago I thought I knew the history of this movie, never doubting it was the condensed version of the Galaxy Express 999 TV series, but the on-disk “liner” notes of the Eastern Star/Diskotek blu-ray tell a different story. Apparently the movie was being made at the same time as the TV show was airing in Japan, so they were parallel productions, two versions of the same story (both based on the manga, which . . . was also not finished yet). That producers and studios were willing to put money into making it in those circumstances was, it seems, attributable entirely to the popularity of creator Leiji (or Reiji) Matsumoto and to the fantastic box-office numbers of the movie version of Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato (the franchise reworked for the U.S. as Star Blazers).

It was a financial gamble, but it paid off, because Galaxy Express 999 was wildly successful in theaters. The blu-ray notes credit this film as a turning point in Japanese perception of anime; after 999 anime was no longer seen as just a children’s medium, and an anime film was appreciated by wider audiences as a film and not just as animation.

3. Length
Still, its roots as a shortened version of a much bigger story are hard to miss, because watching it you can feel like they should’ve shortened it a bit more. The running time is 2 hours, 10 minutes, and you know it. It has a series of mini-adventures—stops on various moons and planets along the train’s route—and it’s easy to start questioning why they’re not moving on with the main plot more directly.

And yet at the end of it, I can’t see much that could simply be cut out, because all the episodic pieces contribute to the story. Yes, it would be possible to make the movie shorter, but whatever you took out would have to be replaced with something that accomplished the same ends, just in less time. (The encounter with Shadow isn’t strictly necessary to the plot, but even that provides a stark example of one way someone responds to having a mechanical body, and it also gives one of the earliest hints that Maetel might be more than a typical rich person. It’s also a well-done scene.)

There’s also something to be said for emphasizing that what happens in Tetsuro’s life is a journey, not a quick resolution to a single problem; he has time to develop and change (and get frustrated) and also build relationships.

4. Relationships
Those relationships are pretty important here.

In fictional media you sometimes have a scenario where the bad guy gets what’s coming to him because he accidentally targets the wrong person—some jerk with a knife tries to mug the super-skilled green beret, or terrorists try to take hostages in the restaurant where Wonder Woman is dining in regular clothing, and they knock her filet mignon on the floor. Particularly in revenge stories this is a popular setup, and even though it might take the course of the whole movie, you know the evildoer is going to pay because he just messed with the wrong dude, starting something too big to handle.

That’s not what happens here. It’s not that the villain “picked on the wrong child this time!”

Tetsuro is not superhuman, or unusually passionate or skilled; he succeeds because of luck, because he’s helped by more powerful people, and because he won’t give up. But his quest could easily have ended up with him getting killed, and to me it feels possible that there were other grieved relatives who might have succeeded too, it just happened to be him.

Yet added to his determination is the fact that people want to help him, and a few of them are quite powerful and important. From the very beginning he’s being helped by others: he can’t steal a train pass without a few friends, friends who aren’t getting anything out of it despite the risks they’re taking. Not just anyone is going to draw out that response from friends, let alone people he or she has just met. So there is something special about him, even if it isn’t unique.

5. Mechanical Bodies
Repeatedly, people with artificial bodies are shown to have lost their humanity in the moral and ethical sense as well as the merely physical. Part of the problem seems to be that in artificial bodies you can be immortal (as long as no one shoots you with a particular weapon or, say, blows up the spaceship you’re on). With your own life secure, you value other lives less, apparently. And, says Tetsuro at one point, knowing we’re going to die makes us try harder to accomplish our goals, and makes us treat other people with more kindness. (I’m not sure there’s much evidence that our own mortality makes us kinder. It seems to me that knowing you’ll die can also make you trample on people in your desperation to stay ahead of death and fulfill your desires while you can.)

And yet it’s not as simple as “machine bodies destroy your humanity.” One of the “good guys” chooses to send his spirit into a machine, and one of the “bad guys” notes that despite her mechanical body, no one could control her warm human spirit.

6. Stray Thoughts
Yes, it is a little odd to have your high-tech interplanetary spaceship shaped like an old steam-driven train. The characters do give an excuse for this, at least.

The train in a few places has levers moving and dials activating on their own. Is this a hint that the train too has a human’s spirit inside it?

Maetel says/thinks some curious things about her relationship to the planet, and I wonder if the original TV show explained what she meant, because it’s definitely not clear in the movie.

Galaxy Express 999 is a significant piece of creator Leiji Matsumoto’s wider Captain Harlock universe. Looking at it from that perspective, some random kid wanders in from one side and plays a pivotal role in the bigger hero’s story, then walks off on the other side. Things get done in the Harlock-Emeraldas world that wouldn’t get done without Tetsuro, but he’ll never be as famous or as powerful as the major players. It’s possible to do something the big names can’t, but it may be the only time the universe notices you.

It might be missed in all the other things that are happening, but an awful lot of characters express a longing for things lost: not only a lost mother, but also lost youth, lost lover, lost son, lost chances . . . lost bodies.

Reflections: The Rescuers (1977)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover for the 35th anniversary edition Blu-ray of Disney's movie The Rescuers with The Rescuers Down Under included

This was one of those Disney movies I was ready to see over and over during my childhood. I liked the mice, I thought the albatross was funny, and the dragonfly and alligators were great—but what really captured my interest was the skull.

Human skulls were not common in children’s entertainment in those days (late 1970s, early 80s). I was fascinated. The skull was realistic enough to be creepy and make me feel like squirming, and then it had a jewel in its eye socket! Invisible shivers. Something about there being eye holes in the first place, the emptiness of the skull where eyes ought to be, was particularly unnerving. (We soon see the whole inside of the empty skull, but it’s the eye sockets that got to me.)

I loved that part of the movie, every time.

Unlike The Aristocats (another big favorite), The Rescuers had no spectacular catchy music; “Rescue Aid So-ci-e-ty” was likable, but not amazing, and that’s the only tune I could remember from the whole thing. Watching it again, I find that the other songs are quite nice, but they’re gentle (or sad) and not tunes that reach out and shake you. They’re like slightly more hopeful Carpenters songs.

I was an adult before I understood the movie was based on a series of books, and it wasn’t until a year ago that I read any of them, the first two. The things I remember most are:
1. There are vast differences between the movie and the books.
2. The second book (Miss Bianca) includes crazy wind-up robot maids that are utterly unrealistic even today.
3. The first book ended so conclusively there could not be a continuation featuring these two mice, and yet there was, and the resolution of the first one was conveniently forgotten.

Disney sort of took the Bianca-and-Bernard-meet-and-get-to-know-each-other material from book one, transformed and transplanted the captive-girl-and-rich-crazy-woman aspects of book two, then added in their own plot (possibly with some elements lifted from later books I didn’t read). Basically, don’t expect to find the movie story in one of the Margery Sharp books.

  • A romance between Bianca and Bernard doesn’t seem quite right. They’re in two different worlds, right? She’s very glamorous and he very much isn’t. And yet, watching it on screen, with the vocal performance of Eva Gabor and the way Bianca is animated, it does seem to work after all. Seeing and listening to Bianca interact with other characters I just end up believing, yes, she might pick him. Why not? It feels like there’s no reason she has to but also no reason she wouldn’t.
  • The opening credits play out over a series of lovely paintings that show Penny’s message bottle traveling through the waters. For the most part these are still images, with the camera panning across them, and it’s easy to miss that something is actually happening. Regular animation might better focus the audience (especially children) on the bottle and its journey, but I’m not sure I would choose that if I could.
  • Although the artwork is much more polished and finished than what you see in The Aristocats, this movie too has some of that sketch-like style created by leaving a few working lines unerased and visible under the colors. It’s mostly seen around the outer edges of a character, particularly when someone is moving quickly.
  • In addition to the skull, another thing that fascinated my childhood self was the use of a comb as a ladder. I don’t know why, but that just really struck me, probably connected to seeing an everyday object that’s small to me but huge to these characters and used for something totally different. (Call it the “Borrowers Effect.”)
  • In Madame Medusa’s pawn shop, she has an NRA badge hanging on the bars protecting the cashier’s window. Boy does she live up to it.
  • At this point Disney was still doing alcohol as comic relief, though without identifying it as alcohol. It’s just a jug, but you can figure out quickly that it’s moonshine.
  • Honestly the whole element of what I’ll kindly call “uneducated country folk” humor puts me off nowadays, but I’m just going to overlook it here and tell myself it’s redeemed by how helpful these characters are. (They’re rescuers too, actually.)

Decades later, I still enjoy The Rescuers a lot.

Though I think I’d like Evinrude more without the moustache.

The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

I didn’t see this movie until fifteen or twenty years after its release. As much as I loved the original, I didn’t feel any particular draw to the sequel. I have a feeling it looked too polished for my tastes, not as rough and earthy as the original, giving it the flavor of a cheap, sanitized direct-to-home-video release. (Though it’s safe to say the sequel cost a whole lot more, and probably had more work-hours poured into it.)

Before watching Rescuers Down Under a second time, I couldn’t remember much about it aside from a large bird flying down over a waterfall, a mouse* with an Australian accent hitting on Miss Bianca, and a boy being the rescued human. I didn’t recall anything that would justify making the sequel—after 13 years, it wasn’t a hot property, and the new story was evidently not that memorable. So maybe Disney felt they had to put out something, and Beauty and the Beast wasn’t ready yet?

Yet it’s an enjoyable movie. There’s a lot of really lovely animation—especially early on, with dives and soaring and little details like the boy running his hand up a loose feather—and I feel good seeing Bernard and Bianca together again. (It isn’t clear how much time has passed since the first movie, and that’s probably a good thing; you can decide for yourself how long their relationship has been developing.)

  • According to the credits, this movie wasn’t even “suggested by” Margery Sharp’s books, it was “suggested by characters created by Margery Sharp.” Lotta distance there.
  • Surprisingly, Bianca and Bernard are played by the same stars as in the first film; even the R.A.S. chairman’s voice actor returns. They couldn’t have Orville the albatross voiced by the same man, and instead of the easy answer—quietly recast the role—they chose to hire someone famous and say this film’s albatross was Orville’s brother (called Wilbur, naturally).
  • There’s a lot here that anticipates The Lion King. During the opening credits, a casual viewer might even think this was The Lion King before the title appears. And let me say the movement through the field of flowers, which go whizzing by while objects in the distance barely get bigger, is marvelous.
  • This was one of Disney’s early efforts in mixing CGI with hand-drawn animation. It isn’t quite seamless, because you can tell certain shots use computer-generated objects, but it’s smooth enough you don’t think, “Ugh, that looks lousy! How primitive!” Or at least I didn’t think that. I’ve seen lots of mixtures of CGI and hand-drawn art that didn’t work, but this one did. (Also I was kind of shocked to see a Pixar section in the closing credits. This early.)
  • A point that may seem minor: it’s essential to the climax that mice can’t get out of a certain giant cage, so fine mesh—like the material a screen door is made of—has to be lining that cage. That is really difficult to draw, keeping the lines close enough together that we can tell what it is but with enough space between lines that we can see what’s on the other side. The animators had to do it in multiple scenes, even before the mesh was important to the plot, and they did it perfectly.
  • The chainsaw was too much. Eee.
  • Interesting aspect of the title: as in the first film, animals rescue humans, but this time humans also rescue animals.
  • The villain in this story is not only ready to feed a little boy to crocodiles, he says outright that he thinks that’s fun. Yikes.
  • Heroes in Disney movies don’t normally take extra steps that will obviously speed up a villain’s death. Well.
  • Where’s this little boy’s accent?

As Disney sequels go, this one’s good. The story as a whole might not stick with you too long, but the plot seems solid and well-planned. There’s just some emotion missing, which the action doesn’t quite generate. Otherwise the movie received all the effort and treatment a theatrical release deserves. (This is no Return of Jafar.)

*I thought he might be a jerboa, but after five minutes of research I figure he’s a species of hopping mouse, maybe the spinifex.