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.

Reflections: The Sound of Music (1965 film)

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cover to the 50th Anniversary blu-ray edition of The Sound of Music

Like many people of my generation, I grew up seeing Sound of Music—or more often, parts of it—every year on TV. I loved the puppet show; I found the song “Edelweiss” hauntingly beautiful and moving without knowing why; and I liked (precociously) the romance between Liesel and Rolf.

Though the movie as a whole was sometimes too long for me then, and had a lot of stretches where I couldn’t see much happening, today I love it, especially the songs, which consistently make me tear up.

• Throughout the film you see the power of filming on location instead of in a studio, even after the soaring panoramic views of Alpine grandeur in the opening sequence.

• The people making this movie understood the power of silence and not forcing background music into every scene. Note especially the dead quiet of the house when Maria first arrives and is meeting the Captain.

• The fact that Julie Andrews has such a splendid voice and uses it so well makes it too easy to forget she’s also extremely good at being funny.

• Two early scenes use the children pretty unconvincingly. I don’t for a moment believe that any but the youngest two feel guilty enough to actually cry at the dinner table; unless we’re supposed to understand the older ones are faking it, maybe to lull Maria into a false sense of security.

Also I don’t buy that all of them are so scared of the thunderstorm they rush to Maria’s room for comfort, and huddle quivering with every peal. Now maybe the noise of the youngest children alerted the others, and they came mostly so they wouldn’t be left out, but I still don’t think they’d be bent over and shaking every time the thunder sounded.

• It took time for Maria to make all those clothes for herself and the children—their mountain outing does not take place on her second day. Maria and the children have had some time offscreen getting to know one another.

• During the “Do Re Mi” number, there are several changes of costume. This is not a continuity error, it’s not a movie-making conceit you’re supposed to overlook, and it doesn’t mean they’re so rich and sophisticated they have a different outfit for every occasion.

It happens in order to show time passing.

The action is a single song to us, but within the story it spans several days, and those days may not even be consecutive.

The children do not learn to sing in only one afternoon.

• With seven children it’s unavoidable that some are less prominent than others, but you can’t ignore Angela Cartwright, who would go on to be many viewers’ first TV crush on Lost in Space.

• When talking to Maria in her bedroom, the Baroness has a hidden agenda, pretends to a concern and kindness she does not feel, and uses manipulation to get her way. Yet she does it by telling the truth and without making Maria do anything under false pretenses. It’s sleazy, and yet Maria, in full possession of the facts from another source, would respond exactly the same way.

• There are many paths in life, and just because you think one is what you’re supposed to do doesn’t mean it’s where you belong.

• If you reset the story a few years before or after, or just skimmed over the real-life context, the movie would end with the wedding. But there’s another half-hour to go, because solving a problem like Maria is not the only thing to do here.

• Rolf was a favorite character of mine as a child, in part because he shared a name with one of my favorite Muppets (spelled differently, though I didn’t know that). I was shocked watching the film again as an adult: in my memory of the story, Rolf helped the family escape, although he did not go with them. Funny how you can rewrite things in your head to make them easier on you.

• The Sound of Music never shows us Nazis committing atrocities. They‘re overbearing and act like bullies, but little else onscreen. The worst action they take is hunting a man and his family after he refuses to be in their navy, yet the film makes no effort to show us why he refuses. We’re expected to know that Nazis are unacceptable evil and a genuine menace; the story doesn’t have to prove it to us.

• Nothing more is done with it within the film, so we don’t know, but there’s a shot of the Von Trapp butler looking out the window as the family quietly pushes the car to the street for a night-time escape. He looks disapproving. Or maybe just concerned? But I’m left with a feeling that he may have contacted the Nazis to tip them off. Then again, it could be nothing more than a sour face. We don’t know. And perhaps that is a message itself: one of the most destructive elements shared by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, whether Nazi, Fascist, Communist, or something else, is making you wonder who around you is an informant, eroding your trust in people you’ve known your entire life. You’re left with fear and suspicion, set off by something as insignificant as somebody glancing out a window. So, indirectly, we do see another terrible thing done by the Nazis.

Reflections: Fantasia (1940)

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photo of the cover for the "Best of Mickey" blu-ray including Fantasia, Fantasia 2000, and Celebrating Mickey (Disney Movie Club exclusive)

When I was a child, I only wanted to watch Fantasia for one reason: to see the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment, which I enjoyed every time. Yes, the dancing crocodiles and hippos were fun, and the mountain monster near the end was impressive, if you could stay awake that long. But the rest of the movie was boring.

I’m afraid I’m not doing too much better as an adult: I have trouble enjoying the abstract segments because I‘m impatient to get to the “good parts” that have narrative structure. Alas, I too am a Philistine.

• The host introduces the first section (Toccata and Fugue in D Minor) by essentially saying, “First you’ll see this, and then you’ll see that,” and I want to tell him, “Get on with it! You don’t have to tell us what we’ll see, just show it and let us judge for ourselves!” Then I realize, when Fantasia first appeared he DID need to explain what audiences were going to see. It was too new and different.

Now when he explains the plot of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” right before we see it—that IS ridiculous.

• I doubt there are many films with a soundtrack so consistently first-rate. Even movies that use a lot of classical pieces will usually have incidental background music that’s not particularly noteworthy or memorable. But it’s the nature of Fantasia that virtually every second of non-verbal sound is of the highest quality. 

And yet for some reason when I think about Fantasia, the first music that springs to my mind is the March to the Scaffold from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique . . . which is nowhere in the film.

• The host said The Nutcracker was seldom seen, but we would probably recognize the music. Was he making a joke or is it only since his time that The Nutcracker has become ubiquitous across the U.S. every December?

• We see:
– sultry fish doing veil dances
– dancing mushrooms that are just adorable if you manage to not think of them as racial stereotypes
– cute seasonal pixies that make leaves and snowflakes dance perfectly to Tchaikovsky

• Despite all the dramatic shots of volcanoes and dinosaurs, the “Rite of Spring” segment really drags.

• Who thought of pegasoi as waterfowl?

• I really have to think these two female centaurs have something going on.

two female centaurs from the wine-pressing scene of Fantasia's Pastoral Symphony sequence; one is giving the other a rather significant look
two female centaurs from Fantasia dancing together
two female centaurs from Fantasia dancing together on their way offscreen

• Right, there are ostrich ballerinas too. (A brilliant choice.)

And not just ONE hippo ballerina. Because that wouldn’t be enough.

• The early part of “Night on Bald Mountain” uses a creepy-marvelous effect for the rising ghosts, like curled paper wisping above the background.

• The early part of “Ave Maria” shows the beauty of the multiplane camera, as we look through the trees at the procession. 

• The movie as a whole just might possibly perhaps be a smidge too long. Just maybe.