Following the success of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Walt Disney Production’s most contemporary and “hippest” film yet (though “hip” and “Disney” are correctly thought of as mortal enemies to one another), the studio immediately ran as far as possible to the other direction, making a film rooted in an antiquity that hadn’t even been […]
It is both convenient and at times very useful to divide Disney’s history into certain periods. The simplest (and thus, the least useful) of these divisions is into the classic period – from the beginning to Walt’s death – and the modern period. That this is plainly undesirable is because it suggests, among other things, […]
The blithering waste of celluloid that was Dream Lover at least had the effect of putting a little juice back into Alan Pakula’s career: at the very least, he’d never make such an ossified mediocrity as Sophie’s Choice ever again, though mediocrity was certainly part of his career until the end. That said, his 1987 […]
Other Disney films may have had more tortured productions (Alice in Wonderland), had a more dangerously inflated budget (
There is but one thing more annoying than wanting very much to love a movie, only to find out that it kind of sucks: wanting very much to hate a movie, only to find out that it’s pretty good. Other than its atrociously over-compensatory subtitle, Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire is at […]
1955 was a hell of a year for Walt Disney Productions to even think about releasing an animated feature. This was right after their distribution deal with RKO had ended, replaced by the in-house Buena Vista Distribution, though that was probably the smallest issue facing the studio. For in 1952, the company had officially announced […]
After Sophie’s Choice won piles of undeserved acclaim from critics who, one assumes, were too chickenshit to criticise a movie about the Holocaust, Alan J. Pakula lay silent for a long time. Three years and some months passed until his next movie came out, the longest gap in his career as either director or producer […]
When the Disney Studios released its 14th animated feature, Peter Pan, in 1953, it was two years since their most recent full-length project, Alice in Wonderland. This was the first time that a full calendar year went by without a new Disney feature since 1945. Hold on to this fact, because it’s going to be […]
It is well to say that Richard Kelly has a weird mind. The most prosaic and easy to follow of his three features – that would be 2001’s Donnie Darko, a film for which the phrase “cult hit” could have been coined – is most famous for its convoluted circular time-travel narrative and its refusal […]
Walt Disney’s personal history with Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson’s Alice novels (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) extended almost to the earliest days in his career: in 1923, the 21-year-old Disney was based in Kansas City, Missouri, where he and a team of future animation giants (including Ub Iwerks, Rudy Ising, Hugh Harman, […]
The biggest surprise by far to be found in Robert Zemeckis’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is that it isn’t absolutely dreadful. Perfectly pointless, maybe, but not dreadful. At this point, there have been so many film adaptations of the 1843 novella that it’s nearly impossible to imagine what conceivable purpose another […]
In the first couple of years following World War II, as I have suggested, the Disney Animation Studios had begun to lose its way: too many cheap make-work projects that didn’t challenge the animators enough and only barely broke even had inevitably led to a slipping of quality, and by 1947 or so, it was […]
