Tag: animated films

Reflections: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the GKids blu-ray release of the animated film Kiki's Delivery Service, showing Kiki smiling as she flies towards the left on her broom, with Jiji the black cat perching on her shoulderbag and birds flying by
Kiki, Jiji, and a radio

It is so strange to see Kiki in more colorful clothes at the start of the movie. I completely forgot this was in the film.

Kiki meets another witch who seems like a snob but nevertheless takes time to answer her questions; she might be showing off and acting fancy, but she isn’t mean or rude. Jiji says the cat is stuck-up, but later he says the same thing about a different cat and learns otherwise.

I notice this other witch’s dress isn’t actually black.

With all the other times characters act like snobs, is Kiki guilty of this too, in her early treatment of Tombo?

Osono: the warmth and comfort of being welcomed by a stranger into her kitchen to share a hot drink—not as a daughter but also not quite as a friend, seen as still a child but able to make your own decisions, given extra kindness and understanding but not indulgence. Later Ursula the painter does much the same, though as less of a stranger by then.

A silent baker shamelessly showing off—for the cat.

An artist in the woods, independent and following her own path; and, we learn, she has previously had to break from her old practice of copying other painters.

This aged dog is an artistic ancestor of Heen in Howl’s Moving Castle.

Kiki, you need to say thank you to that dog.

Kiki tells Osono she can’t make deliveries now, and seems genuinely afraid she’ll be asked to leave the bakery attic. She ought to know Osono wouldn’t throw her out, but she is still thirteen years old, not as grown-up internally as she often seems.

Someone you care for is in mortal danger, and there is no hope for him but you, and yet the one special thing that makes you able to help is the thing that isn’t working at that moment.

A dirigible captain who knows his priorities: speak to the boy to give him instructions and reassurance, not to the crew, who know their jobs and signed on for this task knowing the risks.

“There are still times I feel sad . . .”

By the end of the movie, Kiki still doesn’t have a special skill or focus. She flies . . . which is the basic thing that all witches do. This always leaves me dissatisfied; but perhaps the point is her acceptance that right now, being able to fly on a broom (and talk to a cat) is enough.

Miyazaki elements: of course the flying machines, and flight in general; the need to find a balance between the old ways and the new ways; expressive faces as always; and a girl with grim determination as invisible power courses around her, making her hair rise up.

•

There is no single trigger for Kiki’s crisis of confidence. We see her repeatedly regret the way she must dress while other girls get to look nice. She encounters the other witch who has a speciality, while she does not. She’s learned that the town has rules and habits that don’t make allowances for witches. Staring in boredom out a window, she looks up with interest at the sight of a young man, only to watch him leave with a cheerful young woman in a light-colored dress. We can imagine, though it’s never hinted at in anything she says, that Kiki second-guesses her decision to leave home before preparing herself better and maybe learning some of those potions her mother wanted to teach her. Possibly she asks herself if she gets along better with adults than people her own age because she’s old-fashioned and behind the times. She admits that she doesn’t find flying fun. She ends up wet and bedraggled face-to-face with a well-to-do birthday girl in her party dress, who treats Kiki like an unimportant laborer—treatment in keeping with being a deliveryperson. Then she gets upset that Tombo is friends with this girl.

It isn’t as simple as Kiki wanting to be like the birthday girl, though, because it seems clear Kiki considers her rude and ungrateful, someone who speaks dismissively of a good and thoughtful grandmother. Kiki may want what the richer girl has, but she wouldn’t want to be her. Is it possible to have it both ways, being fashionable and glamorous but at the same time pure in heart and respectful and kind? Does being the second mean she’ll never be the first?

•

I imagine this conversation as Kiki returns the broom at the end of the movie:

Kiki (bowing): Thank you so much for letting me borrow this!
Street sweeper: Oh, not at all! I’m glad it was useful!
Kiki: It’s a good broom. Please continue to take good care of it.
Street sweeper: Oh! Well, if you like it so much—you could have it!
Kiki: Oh, no! I couldn’t! It belongs with you. It wouldn’t like to be given away.
Street sweeper (looking with puzzlement at broom-head): Is that so . . . ?

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the GKids blu-ray release of My Neighbor Totoro, showing a girl holding an umbrella waiting at a bus stop in the rain beside a large fluffy blue-grey whiskered creature staring straight ahead; he has a leaf on his head
In Miyazaki’s original version of the story, there was only one girl, not a pair of sisters.

Totoro in a few words and phrases: joyful, playful, beaming with wonder, rich in emotion.

Miyazaki trademarks offered here: nature coexisting with humans and vice versa, touches of a not-hostile supernatural, flying in strong wind, active girls looking out for their family or community, facial expressions that communicate so much.

Both girls, but especially Mei, show absolute delight and eagerness when they encounter creatures and situations that would be scary if allowed to be. The girls boldly leap at things that are strange and new.

You can be good, kind, and respectful but still behave like a kid.

Satsuki is working so hard to fill the place her mother would: preparing bento boxes, tending the kitchen fire, fixing her little sister’s hair, reminding her father of things.

At the start you see the truck packed with belongings, and Miyazaki doesn’t forget to include, without drawing any special attention to them, a pair of umbrellas sticking out the top.

I wonder if Totoro’s breath smells like leaves and fresh grass. It must not smell bad, and is likely even pleasant, because Mei and Satsuki aren’t the least bit fazed when he exhales a gale on either of them.

I will always and forever love the catbus.

When your dog seems to be barking at nothing at all, it might not be a ghost—it might be a catbus.

Reflections: The Secret of NIMH (1982)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the blu-ray release of the 1982 movie The Secret of NIMH, focussed on a cutely drawn mouse holding an amulet with a reflective red stone

1. The Nostalgic Part
This is another one of those movies I loved as a child, fascinated by and drawn to the dangerous, frightening parts: strange experiments changing you into something you weren’t, companions perishing in a desperate escape, wounds that bleed.

For me this movie has always been blanketed with a layer of tragedy. Bambi is famous for traumatizing children with their first dose of animated death, but in my childhood it was Secret of NIMH that stood out for the weight of physical danger and horrible things being done to you against your will. I wasn’t in any doubt about what happened to those mice that fell down the shaft during the escape, or about the fact that the experiments were horribly painful to the rats. By this time I had seen Star Wars, Clash of the Titans,  and Dragonslayer, but the violence in those live-action movies didn’t affect me the way things in NIMH did. Was NIMH more disturbing because it was less glaringly fantasy-based; because the movie kept things more mysterious; or simply because the story was more intimate so I cared more about the characters? Or was it maybe because all the live-action heroes were fighting back, and the animated mice and rats were so terribly helpless?

2. The Background
The movie is based on a book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brian, published in 1971. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard the film changed a lot, which is what you’d expect.

The movie changed the lead character’s name from Frisby to Brisby, and common wisdom says it was to avoid connection with the brand name of a certain “flying disc.” I suspect common wisdom is right, whether that was a legal move necessitated by trademark concerns or simply a worry that her name would make people laugh.

Then much more than now, it was tough to get an animated movie on the theater screen if you weren’t Disney. (This was also before VCRs were common, so there wasn’t even a direct-to-video market.) But this is one of the few that managed it. Don Bluth and his team were helping to blaze a trail for non-Disney animation to be produced and released in the U.S.

3. Scattered Things
Evidently this movie was rated G by people who saw that it was a cartoon and didn’t bother to watch it. It includes vibrant red blood, a deliberate murder, another deliberate killing that was either an effort to save someone else or a bit of revenge (or both), and talk about torture and hearing the screams of laboratory animals at night. The main character is a widow whose husband’s death is the first thing you hear about in the movie. There’s also a quick curse word (spoken by one of the good guys, no less), and I have a suspicion it was thrown in by the filmmakers so the movie would be PG. To no avail.

The movie does an impressive job creating an air of menace and danger in multiple scenes with different threats. Mrs. Brisby is at the mercy of a whole lot of things, whether it’s larger animals or human decisions or illness affecting her children.

I thought the clumsy bird was a crow, but he’s just tiny compared to the cat. On the other hand, the movie—set in North America!—also shows a spider that’s three times the size of a mouse, so I think the animators were a bit unreliable regarding scale.

There’s a quick mention by Mrs. Brisby that her children are better at reading than she is—and while it’s true that learning as a child can be faster than learning as an adult, this is definitely a little nod to the fact that her husband was more than an ordinary mouse and has passed things on to their children.

I am always gripped by scenes of radiant transcendent power summoned by great emotional need to accomplish the impossible just when all hope is gone. And yet I can’t help feeling Secret of NIMH should’ve avoided mixing magic with the science fiction. The amulet, Nicodemus’s whirligig device that shows images from the past, and the rosebush vines that move and rearrange themselves are things I can’t square with the notion that the rats owe their secret world to the intelligence produced in them by medical experimentation.

Before I rewatched this movie, my memory had no doubt that Mrs. Brisby ends up with Justin, the captain of the guard. My memory is wrong. They’re clearly drawn to each other, I wasn’t inventing that, but there’s no hint that they become a couple once the action is over. Which is pretty reasonable but not typical for animated films.

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: 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.