Bad Animated Sequels?: The Curious Case of the Land Before Time

I don’t understand it when someone tells me they “don’t watch kids movies.” The best works of Disney, Pixar, The Muppets, etc are great pieces of filmmaking plain and simple .This is not to say, however, that there aren’t genuine “kids movies.” As a young child I loved The Land Before Time series; parts II, III, IV and V in particular. For nostalgia’s sake I recently re-watched Parts II and III, and the childishness of them was quite apparent.

For those unfamiliar, The Land Before Time is a series of cartoon films (and later a TV show) about the adventures of five young dinosaurs. The series started with a standalone film. Directed by Don Bluth and produced by Stephen Spielberg, the film was an ambitious and melancholy project and has earned its place as a classic of animated cinema. The original filmmaking team, however, played no role in the development of the subsequent 13 sequels and tv show. And the difference in vision is readily apparent. 

The original Land Before Time is a coming of age story. It puts its protagonist through a life changing tragedy and forces him and his friends to brave overwhelming terrors as they cross a dreary landscape. The sequels, by contrast, are not centred around vast physical or mental journeys. They aren’t without their scary moments, but the events they depict are not as formative or terrifying as the original trek.

In The Land Before Time II, for instance, the characters must retrieve an egg from a pair of thieving struthiomimuses and then try to raise a baby dinosaur. In The Land Before Time III the protagonists deal with bullies, and the bickering of their parents, as their herds are faced with the prospect of a drought.

The initial Land Before Time film both does and doesn’t have a villain. The young dinosaurs have regular run ins with a t-rex. Because the dinosaurs is much bigger than them, and is a carnivore, it is not anthopomorphized like the other characters. It thus doesn’t get to be evil, so much as a terrifying force of nature. This stands in contrast to parts II and III. In part II, the villains are a classic schemer-and-dope duo, whose sole fixation is eating eggs. In part III, the “villains” are a group of teenager dinosaurs who bully the protagonists.

A final key difference between the original film and its sequels is the most obvious. The sequels are musicals, the original is not. The combination of the sequels’ villains and musicality is particularly campy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with singing villains. Disney writer have penned many chilling villain song-liloquies: “Be Prepared,” “Poor Unforuntate Souls,” and “Hell Fire.” The Land Before Time’s equivalents, even by comparison, are wonderfully childish. The latters’ villains sing lines like: “When I wake up first thing I do…look around for something to chew “Eggs-actly””, and “When you’re big you can step on little people’s toes, munch on their lunch, bop them on the nose.”

To be clear, I don’t mind the kitsch of those songs. In fact, I’ve had the tune to “When You’re Big” stuck in my head since I previously saw the movie, about 21 years ago. Overall, however, the childishness of the Land Before Time sequels does come at the expense of their enjoyability for older viewers. The dramatic tension of The Land Before Time III is severely limited by the fact that its antagonists are not vicious hunters, just teenagers intent on saying mean (and inevitably PG) things. 

Animated sequels are often assumed to be bad. In the case of Disney, this is because many of these sequels were not intended for theatrical release, and as such, left narratively and visually underdeveloped (I remember the frustration of my Dad accidentally renting Hercules II for us; Instead of a comedic, Greek epic, we got Disney characters blandly looking through an ancient-high school yearbook). A superficial observer might make a similar comment about The Land Before Time’s direct to video sequels. Such an observation, however, would miss the far more fascinating development at play here.

The (original) Land Before Time may be a kids movie, but it’s one filled with misery. As a kid, I found it unsettling. As a 26-year-old, however, I fell in love with it. I loved that it was a coming of age story about a character who did not man up and change his personality (like Simba and Bambi), but instead built on the compassionate strength he had had all along. As a young man who struggles with imposter syndrome and other pains that come from growing up in a neoliberal world, this message proved particularly inspiring. You don’t always have to be the lion king; sometimes its good enough to be a big-hearted brontosaurus, with a few good friends.

The Land Before Time, in short, is not a true kids movie. Rather it is a movie for adults panged with nostalgia for their childhoods. The sequels, meanwhile, deliver, where the original film cannot. Where the original film is dreary, the sequels are colorful, and sparkling with music. Where the original film deals with the issue of “coming of age” over an extended period of time, the sequels deal with little episodes of kids getting into trouble. And whereas the original film’s villain is an ominous, apersonal predator (a stand in for death in all its forms), the sequels play to schoolyard dynamics, presenting villains whose pettiness may better resemble the ordinary “evil” kids see in their day to day lives.

Movie reviews are written by adults. What it means for movies to be great is determined by adults. Needless to say there’s a flaw with such a set up. The Land Before Time is a great movie, with sequels that do not match is greatness. But does that make them, yet another example of bad, uninspired sequels? No, they are classics in their own, albeit childish way. So next time your child asks to watch one, don’t roll your eyes like Daddy Topps. Instead, be like Ducky and say “yup, yup, yup,” to their request for a great valley adventure.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Directed by: Marianne Heller

Written by: Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster

The trailer I saw for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood struck me as an artifact of its (this) time.  The trailer simply showed Tom Hanks re-enacting the theme song to children’s TV show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with emphasis put on its resemblance to footage from the actual show. 2019 has been a year full of sequels and remakes, which has led to concern that commercial cinema (the Lion King remake in particular) has become more concerned with catering to nostalgia than with heartfelt storytelling. Given the vaulting of Mr. Rogers back into public consciousness via the 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, one would not be remiss to suspect A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood of falling into that trap.

Viewers will be pleasantly surprised when they see the film, which is a true homage and not a mere recreation. The film’s subversiveness strikes early. We are quickly made to realize that A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is not in fact a biopic, but rather an alternative imagining of a Mr. Rogers episode. As a result, the film’s recreation of Rogers’ set no longer comes across as pure aesthetic flash but rather as an invitation for adults for the first time in years (or ever) to guiltlessly enjoy an episode. Mr. Rogers’s legacy in part was that he advocated for children to have a safe space in which to process dark issues such as death, war and racism. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood puts that idea through the mirror. Adults are of course expected to discuss these issues, but we are rarely given the chance to do so in a Rogersian environment.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood should be commended for that vision, as well as for giving Tom Hanks a chance to channel Mr. Rogers’s warm energy. That said, while the film undoubtedly has an auterial side, it has an Oscar bait side as well.  The film is based loosely on a profile of Rogers written by journalist Tom Junod. Junod is loosely adapted for the screen as Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys). We are first introduced to Vogel a new parent and supportive husband to a public interest lawyer, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), who is pained by a past fallout with his father (Chris Cooper). Once Lloyd’s father formally emerges, however, all nuance is swept under the rug. Not only is Lloyd a mess around his father, but he’s also revealed to be an overly cynical, caustic reporter and under responsive to his wife’s concerns.

Predictably the film’s story resolves around the polar clash of personalities between Vogel and Rogers, and while Rogers’ distinct mannerisms keep the film engaging, Vogel’s clichéd cold-dad persona keeps the interactions from feeling truly real. This shortcoming is particularly unfortunate given the potential having Mr. Rogers as a character offers. Mr. Rogers was not simply kind and meditative: he was a singular character. This means that Vogel did not have to be written as his polar opposite for the film’s drama to work. A nuanced Vogel still could have learned a lot from Rogers, but that was a risk it seemed the screenwriters were unwilling to take.

As a child I did not watch much Mr Rogers, but I did watch a lot of Arthur. One of that show’s great episodes features an animated, animalian Rogers as a guest star. The character wisely reassures 8-year-old Arthur about his insecurities about associating with Rogers and his “baby show.” Despite being a children’s show itself, the ten minute episode somehow achieves what It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood does not. Arthur is not depicted one-dimensionally as broken like Lloyd is. Instead, Arthur is show to be a normal kid with anxieties: a normal kid who can nonetheless stand to learn life lessons. 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood rightly teaches that adults need a Mr. Rogers just as much as kids do. Unfortunately it is not bold enough to imagine what such a scenario could actually look like. Arthur is, literally, a cartoon, but figuratively speaking, the real cartoon is Lloyd Vogel. Mr. Rogers was not a cartoon in any sense of the word, and as such, it would be nice to see his spirit helping real adults, just as it helped real children. 

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Directed by: Joe Johnson Written by: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley

It’s been eight years since Captain America: The First Avenger was released and I’ve finally seen it. I’ve long held ambiguous feelings about the character, who I admittedly know little about. On the one I’ve always liked the character’s design, on the other hand I didn’t have a particularly strong appetite for a story I feared might be patriotism-propaganda.

In my previous post, I wrote about the elusive political and moral philosophy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it sometimes raises interesting questions, but ultimately seems to push its viewers back to the safety of status-quo thinking. The interesting thing with Captain America is that precisely because its starting point is blatantly pro-status quo, its trajectory ends up feeling slightly more critical of the status-quo than some other marvel films. Slightly.

Captain America is set during WWII, and its scrawny, well meaning, eager-to-serve protagonist Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) feels like he’s part of a feel-good-nostalgia tale. There’s nothing ground-breaking about this portrayal, but it does make for a nice aesthetic interruption from the typical trajectory of superhero movies. Steve repeatedly tries and fails to join the army and is rejected on health grounds, before he is brought in by a military scientist (Stanley Tucci) who sees his potential. The relationship between Steve and the scientist is largely what saves Captain America from feeling like a propaganda flick. While interviewing Steve to be recruited (in the role that turns out to be “Captain America”), the scientist asks him if he wants to kill Nazis. Steve struggles with the question before finally giving the correct answer that he “hates bullies.”

If the logic of this scene was used to its full potential, it could have set Captain America up to be a very powerful allegory. In its first episode, Steve, an embodiment of an idealized imagining of America would stand for “anti-bullying” against Nazi Scientist Johan Scmidt (Hugo Weaving). Over the course of a series (or even the single film) Steve could then face the reality of his own idealized conception of America clashing with America’s own global record of “bullying.”

But of course Marvel doesn’t go there. In part this is because Captain America: The First Avenger marked the end of an era. In the lead up to The Avengers Marvel introduced an arrogant-genius-businessman, a fallen god, an emotionally-broken-near-anti-hero and, old-fashioned, idealistic Steve. Once these characters were brought together, the uniqueness of their storylines arguably became secondary to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s bigger commitment to building their collective Avengers’ epic. But the choice to avoid complicating Cap’s political arc is, again, because of what I hinted at in my last article. Marvel knew their film would not be as compelling if they portrayed Steve as a stereotypical, rigid patriot, but they also didn’t want to make a provocative political work that messed with the status quo too much.

Political questions aside, Captain America: The First Avenger is also guilty of employing characters it doesn’t quite know what to do with. Steve is given a love interest, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), who on the one hand is an army officer (superficially challenging 1940s gender norms), but on the other hand, feels a bit paint-by-numbers in her personality and does not have too much power outside of that symbolic title. Another important character, Steve’s best friend James Barnes (Sebastian Stan), feels a bit under-used and underdeveloped given the emotional impact he supposedly has on Steve’s life. On the other hand, the villainous Schmidt is a fairly well thought out figure (a Nazi who’s supremacist thought process leads him to see himself as above even other Nazis), though it can be argued he to is underused, and his schemes (particularly one involving a mysteriously blue cube called the tesseract) are under-explained.

I hesitate to play the what-if game, asking what if the Captain America series had stayed a historical-work instead of incorporating Cap into the Avengers’ universe. I realize there’s a good chance that such a sequel would not be as progressive as I would want. In the MCU’s status-quo imaginary, Communists could conceivably replace Nazis as the villains. Still, I think playing such what-if-games are a good way of thinking about Captain America. Sure, they expose where the film fell short for me, but the very fact that I felt inspired to ask such questions shows what the film got right. Captain America is somehow the kind of superhero you can like even if you do believe in kneeling during “The Star Spangled Banner,” and firmly reject patriotism and militarism. Steve is a kid who cared for others and stood up to Nazism. In that sense, he’s everybody’s hero.

 

 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Written and directed by: Jacques Demy

Because I’ve seen only the works that made it overseas, my impression of French cinema has always been that it stand in stark contrast to what Britain and America produce. I expect it to be weird, understated or both. Despite being a French classic, however, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg feels very American. It is the tale of young couple Geneviève and Guy (Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuevo) who are separated when Guy is drafted into the army. Guy is a gas station attendant working for Esso (one of the successor brands of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil), giving him a working-class optimism that is reminiscent of post-World War II era white America. I suppose it can thus be said that one of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s inadvertent qualities is the demystification of France. It presents the country of art, philosophy and cinema as a mundane white-warmongering empire, much as the US so plainly is.

Politics aside The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s is also a fairly simple story. Its characters speak plainly about their motivations and they are all tied to Guy and Geneviève’s romance. All of this is also stated through song: the film, like Les Miserables, is an operetta sans operatic singing. In general the music contributes to the film’s overall aura of beauty, while occasionally the awkwardness of it’s being sung adds a note of humor (if and how it is funny may of course be a product of translation). Unlike Les Miserables, however, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is odd in that it is an operetta without arias (ie discrete songs that stand apart from the sung dialogue). While the lack of arias does not harm The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; if anything, it assists the film’s aesthetic candy-coated realism, it is an odd omission nonetheless. It forces viewers to enjoy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a cohesive whole, rather than allowing them to represent it in their memories with select songs.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is supposedly a favourite work of writer-director Damien Chazelle. It’s influence can be seen in the structures (and character names) of his films La La Land and Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Chazelle’s works entertain in part because they bring together and reintroduce viewers to various elements of popular cultural history. This is why I’m confused, however, as to why The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was made in the first place. Simple as its story was, I was intoxicated by its color pallet, particularly its vintage gas stations (yes that observation comes from someone who avoids driving for environmentalist reasons). When The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was made, however, it was not vintage and would have to have charmed audiences on other grounds.

What those grounds were remains a mystery to me: mostly. The last few shots of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg subvert expectations and do so with optimism and realism. While it is a simple moment, and one I’m hesitant to overplay, there’s something about it that doesn’t feel quite “Hollywood.” So in sum, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is largely an aesthetic pleasure, but at very least there’s a tad more to it. Perhaps viewer, you will unlock more of its secrets.

Dazed and Confused (1993): A Mild Dystopia

Written and directed by: Richard Linklater

I was drawn to Dazed and Confused for two reasons. Firstly, in TV drama Rectified, teenager Jared shows his much older half-brother Daniel the film in order to catch Daniel up on the movies he has missed while in prison. Secondly, the film was directed by Richard Linklater, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of his works so far. Modern film viewers may see Dazed and Confused as a predecessor to teenage-drinking comedies like SuperBad. Indeed, the film can be appreciated on that level; it’s a chance to watch kids revelling in their bad decisions, laugh at low-brow humour and at times, sympathize with them when they are faced with bullying.

However, as someone who spent high school thinking beer was a disgusting concoction that you learned to like somewhere in the distance of adulthood, and that getting drunk was something people only did if when really down on their luck, needless to say, I struggled to relate to films like SuperBad. To me they aren’t comic representations of a universal experience, but depictions of a group of kids I was dis-included from and may not have wanted to have been part of anyway.

Dazed and Confused, however, is fundamentally different from SuperBad. Unlike the 2007 film, it doesn’t consistently follow a small group of protagonists, and doesn’t have much of a plot arc. Dazed and Confused therefore does not encourage viewers to identify with its characters to the same degree that SuperBad does and therefore, has the potential to appeal to a broader audience (that is if much of that audience is not alienated by slightly-experimental, loosely-plotted cinema).

Another key difference between Dazed and Confused and SuperBad, is that the former is a period piece: filmed in the 90s but set in the 1976. Hippy-culture is still a force in the Dazed and Confused universe. The boy characters’ don free-flowing-hair , and sex and drugs are still (unsurprisingly) in vogue. Absent, however, from the world of these high-schoolers is any sort of hippy-politics. Dazed and Confused thus envisions a world of teenage counterculture, but without counter-cultural idealism: quite the opposite in fact as the school’s seniors participate in a ritualized campaign of bullying against freshman. 12^th grade boys chase their freshman counterparts with spanking paddles, while the girls participate in an insult-and-degradation-routine that is most disturbing in that involves a degree of willing participation from its 9^th grade victims.

So what makes Dazed and Confused an arguable classic, and not just some other teens-getting-drunk comedy? I would argue its success lies in that it depicts a veritable dystopia. I call it a dystopia, and not just a film in which some bad things happen, as Dazed and Confused, depicts a suburban-teenage world of-itself, with its own dystopian set of laws. Yes there are adults in the film, but they operate on its periphery, seemingly powerless to infringe on tyrannical, teenage sovereignty and the culture of hazing it produces.

Dazed and Confused can also be said to depict a cohesive, dystopian world because none of its characters are able to articulate just how absurd the ways of their world are (much as a fish would theoretically be unable to identify what water is). The film’s (sort of) “nerdy” friend group features two guys, Mike and Tony (Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp) who operate awkwardly within the logic of the Dazed and Confused world. When, as part of a hazing ritual, 9^th grader Sabrina (Christina Hinjosa) is told to propose to Tony and promise she’ll do anything he wants, Tony half heartedly participates, before telling Sabrina he thinks the whole thing is silly. Tony, and Mike later appear, trying to fitting in at a high school party. They don’t quite cut it, but much like the characters in SuperBad, their nerdiness only goes as far as struggling to fit in with mainstream culture, rather than living outside of it. Mike and Tony are not bullies; they are seemingly idealistic figures, yet they are unable to seriously-question or escape the basic rituals of the Dazed and Confused universe.

Sabrina, like Mike and Tony, shows a degree of resistance to the dystopia’s culture. She is never seen getting drunk, and in a brief exchange with fellow beleaguered freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), comments on the absurdity of what they are going through. On the other hand, Sabrina’s most striking feature is her quietness, and she is introduced to the plot as willing (as far as we know) victim of the 12^th-grade-girls’ hazing ritual. Like Tony and Mike, she is unable to think or exist fully outside the parameters of the dystopia she lives within.

There are numerous other examples of characters in the film failing to deconstruct its universe. Mitch’s older sister Jody (Michelle Burke), knowing full well he will be beaten by 12^th graders, warns his attackers in advance that they should be gentle with him. Apparently telling a teacher that your brother is being bullied, you know, the common sense approach, isn’t an option in the world of Dazed and Confused (again, in this dystopia, teenagers are sovereign). Mitch’s bullies, meanwhile are lead by football player Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) who refuses on principle to sign a form saying he won’t take drugs during football season (as meaningless as such a signature would be), explaining that in principle he can’t give in to such McCarthyism. Again, the logic of Dazed and Confused is expressed: 70s hippyism is present just enough for the character to rail against McCarthyism, yet not enough for the character to see the evident cruelty of his beating up on those smaller than him.

In other moments, the film’s title feels like an apt description for the film’s universe:the characters behave absurdly, as if in a daze. The film is largely devoid of the kind of intellectual conversation seen in Linklater’s other works (eg the “Before” trilogy). The closest a character comes to articulating something interesting is a rant by Slater (Rory Cochrane), the film’s leading stoner, about George Washington. The rant unsurprisingly is a conspiracy theory about the historical importance of weed. In a film in which all the characters are in a daze; unable to see moral logic outside the rules of their universe, such a rant is well placed.

But perhaps no scene represents dazedness better than when the film’s main female antagonist, Michelle (Milla Jovovich) very-drunkenly threatens Sabrina. Her cruelty is absurd, and her dazed-delivery is equally absurd too match.

Dazed and Confused is an enduring work for a number of reasons. Viewers can play spot the star looking for young versions of Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Ben Affleck and Renée Zellwegger. Other viewers may appreciate the film as yet another party comedy. Perhaps I’m alone in seeing the film as dystopian. That’s the impression I get when one of the story’s victims, Mitch, ends the film with a smile on his face after an early-morning return home. Nevertheless, the ingredients are certainly there for viewing the film as a scathing imaginary of 1970s high school life. Dazed and Confused is not a traditional film, but it is not slow or confusing either, meaning viewers with a range of perspectives and tastes will continue to appreciate it.