“This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette and not an alarm — and if a Frenchman turned out the light it was not on account of an air raid!” If I have found one clear through-line connecting most of the films I’ve studied from the great […]

On July 24, 1985, Walt Disney Productions released its 25th animated feature film, The Black Cauldron. The film grossed somewhat more than $21 million in its domestic theatrical release, on a production budget that has still never been officially announced, though it assuredly was much more than $21 million: as much as $45-$50 million according […]

As I have discussed elsewhere, 1979 saw Don Bluth, one of Disney’s best and brightest animators, leave the company fold, declaring (and rightfully, if you asked me), that The House That Walt Built was no longer true to its architect, and that if there was to be a proper heir to the Disney spirit of […]

With The Rescuers, it seemed that the new blood at the Disney Animation Studios had figured out what was what, and were all pumped up to do something even bigger and better, for with the great majority of the old guard retired or planning on doing so any moment, it was clearly a rich time […]

The last animated film released by Walt Disney Productions in the 1970s is a transitional work, the handing of the torch from one generation to another. Even though several of the older generation who was still around at this point managed to stick around for one last film, 1977’s The Rescuers still has a valedictory […]

Even in the depths of the horrible stretch of critical, commercial, and artistic failures that plagued Walt Disney Productions between 1970 and 1988, there’s one spot of true brilliance, although the degree to which The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh belongs to that interregnum is debatable. Its roots lie in the comparatively strong period […]

Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster epic 2012 is absolutely a bad film, and it would be a disservice for me to argue otherwise. At the same time, it’s so deliciously trashy in its badness that it’s actually a bit of fun if you go in ready to laugh; whether with the film or at it, I’d […]

Walt Disney Production’s 1973 Robin Hood, I must confess, holds a very important place in my heart. It was while re-watching the film as a young person (for I had a marked tendency to watch Disney films very often in youth) that I first realised that there was such a thing as a Disney picture […]

And so it was, that Walter Elias Disney was dead, but the company to bear his name continued on. The Florida project that had been the chief focus of the last years of his life was being built with a new intensity of purpose: now it was no longer an East Coast mirror of California’s […]

And now we at last come to the long-awaited “let’s just get this Pakula retrospective the fuck over” part of our program. In 1973, Alan Pakula married for the second time, following his divorce from Hope Lange in 1971. This second marriage was apparently a much happier one, for he and Hannah Cohn Boorstin remained […]

Frank Capra is a hard director for me to get a bead on. Once upon a time, he was one of the most successful working filmmakers in Hollywood, only to have his reputation start to tarnish in later years as he was increasingly regarded as an auteur of banal, feel-good corniness. Then, sometime around 15 […]