Tag: movies

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)

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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.

Reflections: The Little Mermaid (1975 anime)

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cover of the 2015 DVD release of the 1975 Japanese animated version of The Little Mermaid
DVD cover for The Little Mermaid anime

During my childhood in the early/mid 1980s, I saw a Japanese version of The Little Mermaid, my first exposure to the story. It broke my heart and I cherished that feeling.

Years later, when the Disney version first came to theaters, I was surprised they’d chosen a story with an unhappy ending, then felt horribly betrayed when I saw the ending they gave it. They changed the ending?!? How could they?!? 

Ah, youth and inexperience.

(I came to love the Disney version too, eventually.)

The anime version was released on U.S. DVD in 2015; I watched it about two years ago and again shortly before writing this post.

The animation is of course very dated; it’s several steps above Japanese TV shows of its day but not those of today, and it’s bound to suffer by comparison to recent work. I’m accustomed enough to old anime this doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but it would be a shock to anyone who hasn’t seen anything older than, say, Inu Yasha.

A few interesting points:

• If not for a few long shots of a faceless crowd, you’d think there were no mermen at all in the sea kingdom except Marina’s father. (Palace duties are carried out by fish, crabs, jellyfish, and other sea creatures.)

• Marina (the little mermaid) and her sisters don’t wear any kind of clothing, but their grandmother is almost completely covered. You see her face and hands and the end of her tail, but that’s it. Maybe clothes get in the way of swimming and Grandmother doesn’t swim much?

• The Sea Witch creates the storm that wrecks the prince’s ship . . . because she wants to feast on human blood.

• When Marina breaks the rules and runs off at night, making everyone worry and search for her, she is rewarded with an early coming-of-age party and a pendant that supposedly marks her maturity.

• The story takes the time to make sure Marina knows, and we know, that she’s forever giving up her family and her friends and that this is a real loss. Loving the prince doesn’t shield her from feeling this pain.

• In a story where I immediately accept that a mermaid can have conversations with a dolphin, it is still startling to watch a cat speaking back and forth with a human king and queen.

• It’s unbearable to know you will die in the morning and there’s no way to change that; it’s also unbearable to be speaking to your best friend knowing she will die in the morning and being equally powerless to change it.

• We don’t know precisely what voiceless Marina is thinking near the end, but her actions could express either a sense of betrayal at not being chosen (with its complex of anger, humiliation, shame, and the desire to strike back) or a horrible doubt, the fear that the one she risked everything for wasn’t worthy of her love.

The film that was among my earliest introductions to tragic stories can still make my eyes water.

Reflections: The Aristocats (1970)

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photo of the cover for the special edition Blu-ray of the Disney movie The Aristocats
Cover of the Blu-Ray for The Aristocats

I remember this movie from my childhood—not seeing it, primarily, but rather listening to the songs on a record. (Yes, a record; I do go back that far, though I wasn’t yet born when the movie was first released.) Thinking of it always gives me a sensation of energy, happiness, and excitement. The soundtrack still delivers that, because the film is a full-on jazz and swing party.

I did see the movie as a child, too, but I couldn’t tell you just when.

• The art in the movie retains a sketchy quality, not fully polished, sometimes with unerased pencil marks preserved below the coloring. A couple of spots might’ve needed a little more cleanup, but generally I appreciate it, and it’s in keeping with the film’s overall lively, spontaneous tone.

• The fact that the characters are cats, whose movements are naturally slinky and sinuous, provided a lot of leeway for the romancing between O’Malley and Duchess to be quite sensual. It would NOT be G-rated if human characters did the same things.

• The two boy kittens get kind of a bad deal. They don’t have much chance to shine, while their sister Marie, by comparison, gets a spotlight. Personally I think Marie is awesome, so I’m not too upset by this.

• A simple glance at Duchess’s kittens will show you they are not purebred, except maybe Marie, which suggests Madame has not been too concerned with show-cat breeding standards, foreshadowing her attitude towards one Thomas O’Malley.

• “Rich person leaves all the money to a pampered pet” is a premise you can find in many places (for instance, a Martha Speaks episode about a dog who inherits several million dollars), and generally the person leaving all that money to an animal comes off looking crazy, or at best pitiably eccentric. Madame in The Aristocats, however (who sets off the action by changing her will, not by actually dying) is someone the audience is led to take seriously: she might be lonely but doesn’t feel ridiculous. Much of this is due to her character design, which is stately and elegant; her graceful movements; and her warm, caring expressions and vocal tones. A comic-relief character would likely have been short and round and had glasses that kept slipping down her nose, combined with shaking, fumbling, and fidgeting—without changing any dialogue or plot points.

• Edgar the butler had a LOT to put up with over the years. For instance, who else was going to clean up all that paint the cats left on the piano? And that scene was framed as a regular event.

• It’s interesting how unconcerned the rich, pampered, diamond-collar-wearing Duchess is regarding class. She has no trouble accepting O’Malley or Scatcat or their run-down housing, and it’s O’Malley, not her, who brings up the class divide. He’s not prejudiced against her either, but he knows this is an issue and that someone like her is likely to look down on someone like him. Rejecting plot cliches, both characters can acknowledge their vastly different backgrounds without being hindered by them and without those differences being the source of the attraction.

• Listening to “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat” when I was a child, I didn’t know the slang meaning of “square.” It was some years on before I understood that setting music back to the cave man days was a bad thing; I had some vague idea this meant it was so amazing you felt like you’d been knocked through time.

• The movie has a short “drunkenness is comedy” scene, which to me isn’t so much offensive as quaint, a relic of a different time. Within the story it’s arguable whether the goose was inebriated by choice or as one step in a recipe, which may affect how you judge the scene.

• The dogs with their highly un-Parisian “classic hillbilly” accents are not my favorites.

• My only serious problem with this movie, today, is the presentation of a certain cat among Scatcat’s jazz band. The group is international, with Russian and Italian and supposedly British (I would peg him as Californian, but the credits say otherwise) cats all jamming together. But along with them is a Siamese cat: Siamese by breed, but back then that was considered close enough to merit full-blown racial caricature as Chinese. It’s great that the Asian cat is included as an equal in the band, with no hint of being secondary to the others, but . . . the square-teeth design and the atrocious stereotype dialogue are really hard to stomach. Overall he doesn’t have much screen time, but he actually gets more lines than the other band members (except leader Scatcat), so it’s especially sad that it’s cringe-inducing. In a better world he would’ve been drawn with regular pointy cat-teeth and speak sensible dialogue.