Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #75 · 5:00pm Aug 14th, 2023
Do… Do I have something genuinely interesting to talk about two weeks in a row? I… I think I do. 
Yes, shocking, I know. You all know how this year is Disney100, celebrating their centennial as a company? Which, being the 2020s, means they are doing the most shameless nostalgia capitalisation possible. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as with them re-releasing these films over the next two months:
And it turns out to be pretty widespread, not just some arthouse limited thing either! Only a single daily screening in a small screen, of course, but virtually every cinema in Dublin had Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a weekend ago. Even more interesting is that this UK-based list is different than the US list, which started a month ago, only switches every fortnight and is in a lot less theatres, with many states not listed at all. That list, consisting of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Toy Story, Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, The Incredibles, Coco, The Lion King and Moana, about Disney as a modern corporate brand as opposed to a pioneering animation studio with a legacy, looks like someone (or somealgorithm 
) just took the watch hours for evergreen titles on Disney+ and called it a day. Well, with some filtering for variety: I doubt Incredibles or Pirates 1 is that high, and am somewhat surprised they didn’t pick Monsters, Inc. or Finding Nemo in place for the former. Their 3D re-releases are a decade old by now, after all.
Clearly, Disney’s US branch has no faith whatsoever that today’s American kids or their parents will have the slightest interest in anything before the 90’s, or in things they haven’t watched dozens of times at home. Which begs the point of why parents (let’s be honest, the US list isn’t catering to adult Disney fans, whatever some will show up) would spend $30-odd on something their kid(s) do over and over at home. Their own fault, no longer pushing their legacy titles the way they did up to about the Blu-Ray era. It really feels like Disney UK either has more respect for kids’ attention spans, or the people that composed this list are themselves huge legacy Disney Animation fans and sought to make it properly representative of their legacy. For while it’s a largely safe list (and all the love to Toy Story, but I wish they had stuck to just the core studio), and I would certainly do some personal swaps within the same era even bearing in mind influence, it’s an inspiring one all the same.
Plus, you know… I get to see eight Disney Animation films I’ve never seen before on the big screen (I regretfully passed on both The Princess and the Frog in initial release and Beauty and the Beast’s 2012 3D re-release). 
I am an animation historian, or at least a fanatic about animation history, so I was never going to pass this up.
That said… after seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a week ago, I cannot help but wonder if the US list makers have a point. I have had experiences with seeing old films on a big screen and wishing for more of an audience that reacted and got into older films (last year I saw Jaws in IMAX on a Thursday at 10% capacity, and while there were some kids there with their parents, I wished I’d jumped the gun on the sold-out weekend showing in time instead). But the kids and their parents in this screen (a 60-seat screen about one-third full at midday) were just… apathetic. It took until the legendary washing up scene, 40-odd minutes in, for the first audible reaction from a kid at Dopey’s classic soap slapstick. If you don’t remember the film too vividly (or, god forbid… if you haven’t seen it…! 
), to that point, there had been quite a lot of 30’s animated slapstick at its finest. Instead I got a pair of girls running out and back in twice. Thereafter a few other of the most impeccable slapstick examples produced mild reactions, but against one sibling/parent leaving with their kid right as the Queen was kicking her plan into high gear, and the lack of answers from the kids when the parents asked what they thought when it was over… it was very disheartening. When I read a Letterboxd review of someone who watched it theatrically the same day describing the treat of toddlers laughing at gags like the tortoise’s Sisyphean climbing up the stairs, only to come tumbling down by the rush of the fleeing woodland animals… I think I felt my wispy, protoplasmic heart shatter.
[Also diluting my viewing: the technical state of the screening, which on top of clearly just being the Blu-Ray transfer (a 4K transfer is in the works, but either isn’t finished or wasn’t provided), actually dipped the curtain as though it were a widescreen film, then projected the 1.33:1 film within that. Letterboxed, so there were black borders, but it was clearly aligned for the normal height, because the top and bottom were cropped, as evident by the text during the opening credits, storybook opening and some shots with characters or elements standing offscreen just a bit too much (I checked the opening when I got home and estimate 15% was lost between the top and bottom of the frame). On top of reducing the visual scope completely unimaginable otherwise in a 30’s film, which you do feel. I won’t say this ruined it for me, but it certainly diffused the experience somewhat. It may not be as objectively bad as the 80’s re-releases that cropped these films as most cinemas lacked projectors that could show 1.33:1 films (so you were losing 25% of the frame), but jesus… there is no excuse for this. None. 
I’m definitely picking a different cinema for Bambi this weekend (I chose this for the cheap kids’ club screening price of €4.50), hoping this was just an anomaly. Otherwise… rough times until The Jungle Book, the first of these not animated in 1.33:1.]
Look, I’m not ignorant. The film ain’t absolutely timeless when it comes to its storytelling: on top of the very distractingly-30’s voice and singing of Snow White herself, the Disney Studio was very unsure how to do storytelling in longer chunks than single reels, all they or any commercial animators in America knew then. And so, sandwiched in between the over-efficiency of its opening act and what would be a modern structural back half occupying not even half an hour at the end, we basically have several Silly Symphonies in the middle, with just enough narrative tissue and flow to link them. By Pinocchio two years later, there would be far more complex, elaborate and confident plotting. Even I find my patience tested somewhat by the film’s middle; if a modern viewer incapable of adjusting to older methods of storytelling were to find a lot of this film boring, I may pity them, but I can’t call their accusation totally baseless.
But… it’s just such an entertaining classic that’s so ambitious that the parts where the execution don’t quite match the ambition are easily forgivable. And the parts where the execution does match the ambition outnumber the former several times over. I will of course usually pick a 90’s Disney film over this to watch casually, but the idea of not finding it top-tier entertainment is ludicrous. [I had another 400 words here on the film’s strengths, but after checking this opening blurb’s word count, copped on I was rambling, and shelved it. Please, folks, give me an excuse to resurrect that material in the comments. 
]
Given my childhood memories of being enthralled by Peter Pan, and how delightful a surface-level kids’ adventure story I found 101 Dalmatians as an adult, I predict (and hope), that it might just have been the cadence of this film, and that they will respond better to those faster, more “conventionally” child-gearing 50’s/60’s films. I’m not bullish enough to hold out hope for Bambi, a spiritual, almost nature documentary observation of woodland life. That has no hope for kids who can barely be entertained by the delightful dwarfs.
Okay, that was definitely longer than I’d planned. I get passionate about Disney Animation, as you can tell. Let’s rattle off some horse words in a different kind of fairy tale land.
This Week’s Spectral Stories:
Far From The Tree by Sonicsuns
Holidays in Canterlot by Unity Bringer
Three Bolded Words by Casketbase77
Hearth Swarming Eve by horizon
The Carmine Line by Zontan
Weekly Word Count: 21,336 Words
Far From The Tree by Sonicsuns
Genre: Romance/Sad
Applejack, Rarity, Granny Smith
1,206 Words
June 2022
Applejack has just told her family that she and Rarity have been seeing each other. It did not go as she had hoped. Now, after going over all the possible reasons for the lack of instant support and finding that only the one she dreads makes sense, it’s time to confront Granny Smith and find out if her suspicions are true. That her own grandmother is… set in her ways when it comes to what kinds of ponies her family should be with.
You’ll forgive me for the cookie-cutter description that sets alarm bells ringing with the “Applejack/the Apples are homophobic” scenario. This does the two things needed to make it work. One is cycling through Applejack’s recollection of the failed dinner in a semi-narrative sense and her having run through the other possibilities out of a fruitless hope thereafter, all with a keen eye towards an upset hurt that isn’t how AJ normally is, all quiet and desperate, yet which fits the situations perfectly. Being that this is in 1st-person, it nails that quite well. The other is the end result of the talk with Granny, about which I will say nothing other than it is a breath of fresh air and fits the characters very well, the subversion the trope needs.
There really isn’t anything else to this story beyond a solid build-up to that subversion, and for better or for worse, it is well optimised for its tiny length; good pacing, but fades quickly. Well, unless LGBTQ+ relationships personally resonate with you or you quite like RariJack. Though even otherwise, this is solid. Gives short dramatic fics a good name.
Rating: Decent
Holidays in Canterlot by Unity Bringer
Genre: Drama/Slice of Life
Twilight, Rarity
1,690 Words
Jan 2021Reread
Even after playing in the Hearth’s Warming pageant, Twilight has plenty to look forward to this year, introducing her new friends to her parents. Yet as they relax and enjoy themselves around the fire, she notices that one of their group, her fashion-minded friend, isn’t partaking in the festivities.
Being a Breezie gift for Jinglemas 2020 (written by a volunteer when someone didn’t receive their gifted story, if you didn’t know), this is obviously very simple, less a story with a full narrative skeleton and merely an idea. And more one that just presents the surface of its character idea rather than actually doing much with it. But the idea itself is an intriguing enough one, one that plays into Rarity’s aspirations and asks questions of her character. Namely, her impression of Canterlot and those that grew up there, and what she envisioned Twilight’s family would be like. And feeling guilty for having thought such things when they turn out to not be true.
Story’s basically Twilight assuring her it’s okay with a vague notion that they might talk about this again (which is sincere, earnest lip service, but lip service nonetheless – this is every bit a feel-good holiday story as most are). The author was also very interested in the Rarity/Twilight dynamic (and I agree – heck, even for romance, RariTwi can often get me at least curious in a way most others can’t), and while their dialogue and interactions don’t really make much of it, there is the occasional mild zinger.
It’s ultimately every bit the quickly-rattled off saccharine character piece it appears to be, but at least trying to be a character piece means it’s not totally weighless outside of the holiday. More than can be said for quite a few other fics, even if re-reading it was basically an obligation for me as one of 30-odd stories from Jinglemas 2020 on my Re-evaluate bookshelf.
Rating: Passable
Three Bolded Words by Casketbase77
Genre: Drama/Slice of Life
Characters
2,342 Words
April 2020Reread
Lightning Dust’s done plenty of physical checkups in her time. Nothing to them for an athlete of her calibre. Even this one strangely requiring her to do some kind of written test didn’t fully throw her off. What did throw her off was meeting with a different sort of doctor, and being presented with a psych results sheet. One where three bolded words, whose exact meaning she doesn’t know but doesn’t give off a positive vibe in the slightest, leap out at her.
The precursor to Cover to Cover (previewed reviewed in #65) that was not tagged as a sequel given anything relevant from this fic got re-introduced there, this fic takes the notion of “okay, but why is Lightning Dust the way she is?”, boils it down to a specific mental disorder (the long description had the psych results sheet, that ain’t a spoiler folks), ramps up the degree to which she is an asshole but also mentally troubled, and lets her unravel and crumble across from the nurse Speedy Recovery, well out of her depth as somepony normally dealing with physical ailments, and for foals. That’s a lot of potential for drama easy to get muddled or incoherently shuffled, yet despite this being a really early fic for Casketbase77 (only his 8th), there’s a very smooth flow to it.
It’s the rare fic able to do perspective shifts as it goes and make them fit. Partially this is because Dust’s mental instability at this news (the fic steers well clear of such disorders making the recipient incoherent) is throwing her off the game enough that the prose feels a little jumpy anyway, but the flips to the terrified-yet-doing-her-best earth pony explaining what she’s got only serves to increase the tension. For all the fic does end with hope for improvement and on an upbeat note, there’s some pretty tense drama here, especially as Dust can only categorise herself as being sick, getting more confused and desperate as it’s revealed this isn’t something that can just be “cured”. Rarely have I seen a pony’s barriers crumble quite so believably as here, when Dust can recognise something’s wrong with her, but not what.
This is a short little slip of a fic, no less prone to the sharp cutoff and “is that it?” feeling as many of Casket’s other Snippets. Yet this one really struck hard for me. Perhaps I’m overvaluing it on account of recent fresh knowledge of how Dust’s story is continued in the followup (both certainly make the other better once you’ve read them both), but this is one of Casket’s more potent Snippets. Don’t sleep on it.
Rating: Really Good
Hearth Swarming Eve by horizon
Genre: Thriller
Rarity, Mane 6, Chrysalis, Changelings
15,059 Words
December 2014Reread
Directing her first royal Hearth’s Warming pageant and dealing with some unexpected snowstorms turn out to be the least of Twilight’s problems when a changeling army led by Chrysalis arrives in Ponyville. But Rarity notices something isn’t right. Chrysalis isn’t attacking, but merely surrounding the town and looking to discuss diplomacy and bounce her tribe back to successful self-sustainment after their defeat at Canterlot, seeking to leave Equestria altogether. Regardless, what isn’t in doubt is that the changelings are starving and freezing, and can’t be kept from feeding for long. Thus, with insurance against attacks played on both parties, and Twilight and Chrysalis locked in the minutiae of debate and compromise, it falls to Rarity to figure out what’s truly going on, and fast.
Not what it seems several times over, this story is nothing if not a showcase of Rarity at her most seasoned detective. It’s locked reasonably tight to her first-person perspective, which is beneficial in several ways, not least for her concealing and even deceiving her friends at the mystery’s apex not feeling like a character-breaking base. Up to that, she alternates between being relaxed in the early stages and, in the later stages, doing her level best as a seasoned pro to adapt and press forward as, not only once, the rest of the more naïve and upfront Mane 6 undermine her efforts. All coming to a head when deception itself ends up being the true foe, with Rarity copping on to the true reality and scrambling to make it all work out.
Alongside that, the mystery and motives of Chrysalis (in this pre-Season 6 era, when nearly anything still went as regards the changelings) lend a fabulous air of deception. It’s a rare mystery and thriller that can keep things tense and make the mystery actually tough to guess as you go along, while still feeling like a natural conclusion. This manages all three, and while it doesn’t do so flawlessly (the tactic does involve Rarity’s “voice” being rather aloof throughout), the end result of layers unveiled and red herrings contradicted makes it sing. It’s certainly a fic quite inviting to go back through and identify all the setups and plants. Thankfully, I’d forgotten enough about it from my previous reread that this still surprised me plenty here.
Along the way of this battle of wits between Rarity and Chrysalis (how do you outmanoeuvre a creature built on deception’s whose end goal you don’t even know?), we have interesting character interpretations, solid bookends (if an ending that is basically “slam the brakes”), even some good use of comedy at the right points, all building to a very satisfying, entertaining, gripping and uplifting whole. And, by the author’s own words, it’s a Hearth’s Warming story in the same way Die Hard is a Christmas movie, so it works all year round. After two recent flat results on horizon fics I read/reread, it’s great to have this one be a winner.
Rating: Really Good
The Carmine Line by Zontan
Genre: Dark
Rarity, Twilight
1,039 Words
September 2019Reread
During a dress fitting, Rarity accidently nicks Twilight, and after seeing some blood got on the dress later, vows to redo it. Yet the next day, it is not only stainless, but somehow much better, bigger and bolder than before. It isn’t long before confusion turns to curiosity…
This is quite the dark E-rated premise, executed really well. There’s a sense of foreboding, the prose modulates the shift of Rarity from curiosity to her next action, it keeps the level of perspective for Rarity at the right distance to sell it well, and it makes her obsession and the mystery of alicorn blood having this power tantalising. The problem? It ends just as it’s got us really hooked. And not in the way of other dark or horror stories, where not getting an outcome is an effective part of the strategy; it really feels like the prelude to at least a somewhat-longer work, and while it is written to structurally end where it does, it can’t help but feel wanting.
I lead with all that because what’s here is very solid. It was a Quills and Sofas Speedwriting winner, and I can see that fully. Continued into even a short story that kept the quality up, and it could have been a Pretty Good. But it just leaves such a wanting taste at the end, and the feeling at the end does matter, so not quite. If you don’t mind that, this is a knockout.
Rating: Pretty Good
Spooky Summary of Scores:
Excellent: 0
Really Good: 2
Pretty Good: 1
Decent: 1
Passable: 1
Weak: 0
Bad: 0
I feel you on the thing about kids not liking older classics. Last year I was visiting my cousins and we watched the 1990's Anastasia, which we loved as kids. My 8-year old cousin Merida (named after the princess from Brave) saw it for the first time with us and... yeah. Pretty much no reaction. She seemed completely disinterested in anything going on. The adults in the room were bemused and disappointed by this, to say the least.
Fun fact: Disney had this big plan for one of their milestones (I think it was their 75th anniversary). The intention was to make a massive Disney crossover film in which Mickey Mouse disappears and Minny Mouse hires Basil of Baker Street to lead an investigation. I don't recall the details, but I know character from movies like Oliver & Company, The Rescuers, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, and so on were supposed to make appearances. The movie was ultimately scrapped because someone realized it might be too difficult to wrangle so many different characters from so many different movies into a single, easy-to-follow plotline for kids. Instead we ended up getting some crummy Three Musketeers remake starring Mickey, Donald and Goofy.
Which is severely disappointing, if only because I would have loved to have seen Basil make a comeback.
Also: I absolutely second that recommendation of Hearth's Swarming Eve.
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Which, let me tell you, is a rare feat indeed. I take my hat off to you.
My man, you have managed that rare and unusual feat of out-nerding me on Disney Animation trivia.
I had never heard of this project before now, and upon looking it up, it sounds interesting. However, given how chaotic Disney's management was in the early-to-mid-2000's, it's no surprise script troubles would make such a project fall by the wayside.
Honestly, the whole story reminded me of nothing so much as how Michael Eisner proposed one of the segments of Fantasia 2000 have the Disney Princess as its characters (note that the Disney Princess brand did not enter development until December 1999, the month of the film's premiere, so this was an unrelated, earlier proposal). It involved the princesses and their matching princes marching in to "Pomp & Circumstance", and then presenting their new children to an audience full of Disney characters.
It apparently went as far as a story reel, but no further. The crew didn't like the forced crossover aspect, but gave it the old college try, and the project hit the skids when they (the bosses, I believe) decided it would be great to bring back the surviving Nine Old Men to animate short scenes with a signature character they'd each worked on, sharing space with those done by the legendary modern Disney animators. At the pitch, there was dead silence at the story reel's end until Ward Kimball said it was the stupidest idea he'd ever heard. Which was enough for this story proposal to die soon thereafter. It eventually evolved into the Noah's Ark number starring Donald Duck we got (as Donald was the instigator of the chaos in the earlier princess version). Though still retaining the same lazy choice of American graduation music that was also Eisner's idea.
As bad as Disney was as a company then, even they eventually realised how tacky that was. Something the Disney that produced Ralph Breaks the Internet did not. Sigh.
At first I was confused as to how this could have lead into that Three Musketeers video, as Disney's 75th anniversary was in 1998, 6 whole years before it. Turns out it was for Mickey's 75th, which was 2003 (meaning we should prepare for even more Disney centennials in 2028). I actually watched it a lot as a kid and enjoyed it then, but upon revisiting it as an adult, can concede it really doesn't have much of anything to offer an adult fan of Mickey.
I always used to find it very strange that The Great Mouse Detective never got a direct-to-video/dvd sequel, considering how tailor-made a Sherlock Holmes lite story is for other adventures, and that in 2001, those sequels switched from just being followups to 90's hits (and Winnie the Pooh) to being marketing boosters for the releases of the old classics on DVD.
As far as I can tell, I think the fact of the film having being one Disney inherited during the 80's takeover and basically used as their risk-free gamble for whether feature animation was still viable (slashing its budget to $10m) before committing to films the new bosses had okay'd from the start, meant it never got much internal push thereafter, and fell into that territory of being too recent during the DTD wave for kids at the time to now be parents with nostalgia for it, and too old for most kids to care about it. And thus probably their market research and numbers crunching never had it high enough as a choice. Considering that around the time these was shut down, sequels to lesser legacy titles like Aristocats were in production (along with Pinocchio and the stuck-in-limbo-for-five-years Dumbo II), it might have eventually happened. Probably after they'd gotten through Robin Hood 2, The Sword in the Sky, and Alice in Adventureland.
I don't blame the kids, tbh - the classics really look and feel badly dated by modern standards. While someone into movies and animation can appreciate the history and even the sense of 'Snow White crawled so Shrek could run', this is lost on kids who grew up several generations removed from the time when this was peak humor.
If we're feeling cynical, we can note that modern children's media rarely trusts them with a story for 30 minutes let alone 90 (and this is partially Disney's own fault). More generously, we can note (as you did) that Snow White is an ill-paced mess and the art of animated storytelling is miles ahead of where it used to be.
I feel like they might do better with others on that list. Bambi and 101 Dalmatians give cute fuzzies for them to latch onto, and Peter Pan and Jungle Book gives swashbuckling and antics that can probably consistently entertain a little better than their predecessors.
It'd be even better for Great Mouse Detective, Robin Hood, and Emperor's New Grooves, all sadly absent from the celebrations. The recent releases seem out of place, but I suppose the whole point is to showcase their evolution.
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Evidently you think the US list would have been far better. Come on, Dan – I thought my reader-base was better then that.
…And, there it is. I was wondering how long it would be before someone commented, “actually, those early films aren’t good period, of course kids these days aren’t going to like them”, with a helping of “our modern style of storytelling and films is so inarguably better then the Golden Age of Hollywood/Disney”, and hoping it wouldn’t be one of my regulars. Alas…
Rather then rattle off the film’s strengths and turn this into a rant, I will instead just point to it still having too high a rating on the internet, on places like IMDb and the like, for the theory that “even modern adults don’t like it” to hold any water.
Evidently you missed the part above of someone’s else screening that same day where the kids were delighted and enthralled. Which basically tells us it depends on the particular audience, one reason I’m gonna try and see these in the bigger chains going forward, get as big a crowd as I can. 20 kids/parents probably isn’t enough, too small a sample as to risk getting a bunch of apathetic brats.
I concede some of the points to a degree, especially as regards modern media stifling their attention spans (which wasn’t true even in the 90’s, when this very film almost matched Aladdin’s 25 million VHS’ – where Fantasia, a 2-hour selection of classical music videos, was briefly the best-selling video of all time before Beauty and the Beast outpaced it), but still feel if you sit them down with those flicks, they should really dig them. If they think Snow White is slow, after it being animated forces no dawdling or herky-jerky editing on the lines of live-action films from the time…. Nothing else from then short of The Wizard of Oz would be any more easily approachable for a modern kid.
Hell, I’m reminded now of something I’d forgotten; once nearly seven years ago, a friend of my dad’s and his daughter were visiting (she was about… six to eight?). We had a couple of DVDs handy (none of which she’d seen before), and I suggested either Lilo and Stitch or Finding Dory. Yet she gravitated towards the nearly 3-hour long The Great Escape, despite my warning to her dad of its length. Yet on it went. Amazingly, she stayed throughout the whole film, and enjoyed it.
You may be right that Bambi might fare better with the kids this weekend. I had written it off on that front due to how unambiguously adult much of it is (there really is almost nothing ‘for kids’ once they grow into adults), but there is plenty of child Bambi and Thumper exploring the woods that may still be enough on the pretext of “yay, animals, yay!”. If that’s all it takes to entertain them (the pantomime animals in Snow White would like a word…
As for the list, I think representing the eras evenly is the point, what with two each from the Golden Age, Silver Age, xerography era (also Silver Age, but I digress), Renaissance (with one Pixar flick
) and Revival. And as this is all about impact, ease of approach and quality, none of the three you mention were ever going to get in. Though I do really like the latter two quite highly myself.
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Jesus Christ you literally made your own quote up that was nothing near what I said then pinned it on me and capped it with a fucking insult, what the fuck.
I'll show myself the door, holy shit.
I don't think one has to have an opinion of classic vs modern animation, or the relative objective quality thereof, to recognize that the tastes and conventions of animators and audiences have dramatically shifted in the literal century since the medium first started getting established. And I don't think it requires any critique of classic animation to say that, objectively, attention spans have sufficiently changed between classical and modern children that their reaction to a classic movie in a theater is no longer tied solely to that movie's quality. It also must account for the mismatch between the Snow White generation and the TikTok generation in a way that is very difficult to calibrate for.
This also isn't a new problem, although it has accelerated (as the pre-atomic generation yielded to the TV generation, then the internet generation, then the cell phone generation).
I'm no spring chicken, and neither are my gray hairs; longer ago than some people on this website have been alive, I rented Seven Samurai because it was cited as such a classic and so foundational to entire genres of cinema. Two things are simultaneously true: it was a gorgeous and striking film which lived up to its reputation; and it was the most fun I've ever had watching a glacier calve off an ice sheet, melt away into the ocean, and regrow during the next Ice Age. If a Gen X'er watching a pre-modern movie as an adult could have such a strong reaction, I'd be more surprised if a modern child didn't act like the audience you eavesdropped on.
Anyway, thank you for the review, and glad you found one of the good ones! I still need to edit the story's ending to fix the broken Aesop, honestly, although I don't know where I'm going to find the impetus/time. Once the current novel is finished maybe I'll have to dig through google docs and see if there's a finished/edited version ready to copy and paste in, or whether I was still going back and forth over it with pre-readers the last time I hacked at it.
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Toy Story and Frozen are both excellent, foundational pieces of cinema, but you're damn right, it's a crime Emperor's New Groove isn't on the 100-year classics list, and probably it and Robin Hood should have replaced the two CGI films so they could keep the focus on the history of traditional 2d animation.
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…Well that escalated quickly.
Honest to god, hand on heart, Dan, that was the only way I could interpret what you said at the time of posting. Let's just say that I have had a lot of experiences… and I mean a lot… of folks dumping on old animation way beyond anything reasonable.* And on many of those instances, where I did give them the benefit of the doubt on their angle being just what horizon addressed earlier here, changing storytelling styles divorced from the actual quality/entertainment value of the piece… nope, turns out they actually meant they doesn't hold a candle to the modern stuff period. This happened over, and over, and over.
*The most glaring example being that, whenever I raise Dumbo being my personal favourite of Disney Golden Age, with arguably the best Disney-style character animation ever for its titular character making it so emotionally potent, I get one of three reactions. First is the person brings up the outdated cultural depictions as though that totally invalidates the film. Second is a collective "it's okay at best" reaction – and it's quite assertive, not a casual shrug either. Third is them sidestepping saying anything on the film.
So, after that had happened so often, I was reflexively defensive here, and replied right away, when I should have come back to it the next day, after I'd reflected and realised the proper meaning of what you wrote. That, and horizon's comment clarifying things I thought I had communicated properly (partial victim of cutting my piece of the film's strengths), lets me see that now.
Now, I do still stand by a lot of my statements: to clarify a misinterpretation on your end, my thing on Snow White's flip-flop between being too efficient and being too pacey was not a statement of entertainment or quality, more a reflection of an adjustment the modern viewer must make, and honestly less of a problem for kids with all the slapstick. And I really strongly disagree with the old films visually looking poorer than the modern films, especially as compared to something like Shrek that looks like an early 2010s video game by now (also, personally, I found it boring even as a kid, they just walk and talk for most of it; Shrek 2 was far better). But that doesn't matter. I was wrong.
I made a false assumption, overreacted, and it was unjustified. That's on me, and I'm sorry, Dan. Hopefully you'll forgive, and it'll all be water under the bridge.
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Most of what you said is information I thought I was clearly inferring above, but evidently it did not come across well at all.
It boils down to that I by all means expected some of the kids to not vibe with. Even most of them. Just not, you know… all of them (several were shepherded by one adult, so the 20-odd people there was about 2/3's kids). As my story about a daughter's friend sitting through and enjoying The Great Escape shows, plus someone's else screening of this film having excited kids loving the slapstick, it depends on the audience. But off the back of how many kids' screenings I've been to where they are too giddy (at Toy Story 4 they literally would not shut up), getting virtually nothing from every single one of them was… yeah.
Regardless, I appreciate you laying it all out like that. I'm not immune to noticing the above, for kids or even for myself – I will of course usually watch a 90's film over a 40's one. To use an easy comparison, of course Lion King's "normal" character-focused narrative is far easier an appeal for me and kids than the spiritual quasi documentary that is Bambi, films that share quite a bit of overlap, down to the former being pitched as the latter meeting Hamlet in Africa.
I guess I just… try to hold hope that they will be able to sit and be enthralled by real art, no different to having them be captivated by a Miyazaki film. Especially as older animated films, due to the cost of making them, never mooched about the way a live-action film did, and the visuals aren't obviously old to a kid. Brad Bird once remarked that 101 Dalmatians would work basically forever for modern kids, after all. But they do still face some obstacles, yep.
Your point of the animators' style of storytelling shifting reminds me of a comment from the horses' mouths: in a podcast I listened to recently, Disney director Stephen J. Anderson was a guest (director of Meet the Robinsons and co-director on Winnie the Pooh). He said that during production of the former film, he noted how their outline boards were 30-odd sequences thick, as opposed to the 15-odd sequences for a 50's film like Cinderella, and how the brief not-hyper-tied-to-the-plot moments that let those films breathe was something he actively missed about the modern ones they were making.
The latter two kinda bleed together timeline-wise, to the degree I'd have swapped them! Assuming by cell phones you mean the precursor to smart phones. But you're so right about it accelerating. As recently as the 90's, Disney's classic films still sold like hot cakes on VHS (Snow White nearly matched Aladdin's sales; Fantasia did far better than I'd have ever believed).
Another confirmation of a big name here being at least in their 50's! I'm always surprised by each one, even though I shouldn't be.
I haven't seen that film myself (I have seen The Magnificent Seven), but I'd believe you on it being glacially slow despite being a masterpiece.
Still thinking about amending a nine-year old fic! That's dedication. Well, I hope you can pull it through, though I didn't finding it as broken as some others in the comments did.
It's hardly the only Disney film I enjoy less than the consensus, but Robin Hood is the only pre-2010s one for which I, with all my heart, do not understand the appeal to an adult. And I have tried so hard to understand, so tell me, while I have you, my friend: why do you rate it highly? Only so many of the fans can be furries or turned on by Robin Hood himself, and past that, all I see is a hodgepodge of indifferent kids' comedy the filmmakers were evidently bored by, accompanied by twee folk songs, done in "Filmmation with a higher budget" scrawled-in animation. I'll concede one who didn't grow up with it could find it evokes the kind of casual Hanna-Barbara type cartoon they grew up with and provoke a sense of comfy nostalgia, but otherwise, I got nothing. And surely that can't account for everyone.
The above is not meant as a rant or attack of any sort (taking precautions against folks misinterpreting what I mean this time). I legit want to know why a notable number of people rate it so highly, for a pre-Renaissance Disney film, which don't get much traction these days.
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It is forgiven.
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By "cell phone era" I did indeed mean the smartphone era, during which the cell phone became our tether to the world rather than just an omnipresent link.
As far as Robin Hood ... I'm a furry, so I'm not going to give you an answer you either like or find satisfying.
Look, man, I don't know what to tell you, except that there's something people see in it. If you go to Rotten Tomatoes and look up the critic scores, it's in the basement -- 58% versus a number of classics edging close up to 100. But if you look at the audience ratings on those same movies, Robin Hood beats out a surprising majority of the classics. At 81% it outscores Lady And The Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Pinocchio, Dumbo (by a large margin), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs -- that was just a random selection of movies from the critics' top 10. (Fantasia does beat it, but only slightly.)
You're under no obligation to give a crap about popular opinion. I will, for example, be right there with you in saying that My Little Dashie is utter garbage and it's humiliating that it's the single story which has been read an order of magnitude more than anything else in the fandom. BUT, that said, things don't become popular without having *something* which gets a little hook into people's souls. Dashie, for all its faults, is very good at what it does do: it's emotional heroin, punching straight to the vein of wish fulfillment and hammering those nerves.
Saying that Robin Hood is "indifferent kids' comedy the filmmakers were evidently bored by, accompanied by twee folk songs, done in "Filmmation with a higher budget" scrawled-in animation" isn't saying that it's bad. It's saying that it is taking a called shot at things you don't like. I have a feeling that your reaction to Robin Hood is almost identical to mine at Hotel Transylvania and its sequels, which I find tedious lowest-common-denominator slapstick and toddler-attention-span overexaggeration; but having been dragged to a couple of those movies, I've started to realize something about it: it is in fact very good at its l.c.d. slapstick and t-a-s overexaggeration, and it's mining a vein of comedy which traces its roots back to Looney Tunes and utterly unashamed of that pedigree. For all that I dislike the predictable and tiresome animation, the comedic timing with which it hits its beats is methodical and precise, and it's using an animation and body language shorthand that wraps everything smoothly together.
If there's a tl;dr here I think it should be that you should just file Robin Hood in your brain as the My Little Dashie of Disney films, and accept that other people's tastes suck and sometimes that's okay. I don't plan to stop enjoying it, but I doubt I'll be able to articulate that in a way that changes your mind.