“There’s this guy who’s utterly a banker, and he doesn’t have time for his family, or for living, or anything. And Mary Poppins, she comes down from the clouds and shows him what’s important. Fun. Flying kites. All that stuff… It’s a cute movie. Maybe not everybody’s thing, but, y’know… Dick Van Dyke’s British accent […]
In the dark days of the early Aughts, when Disney animation was at its lowest ebb since the 1970s with critical and commercial washouts like Atlantis: The Lost Empire dragging the brand name down into the muck, everybody had an idea to save the company. Throw out Michael Eisner; re-commit to the most beautiful possible […]
An earlier review of this film can be found here. By the end of 2005, Walt Disney Feature Animation was undeniably playing the obnoxious kid brother to Pixar Animation Studios, the company whose films had out-grossed WDFA every single year that they both released a film. Notwithstanding the reasonable success of Chicken Little, which grossed […]
The decision to cut the seventh and final Harry Potter novel into two parts for its film adaptation was a damn bad choice, made for obvious financial reasons despite the filmmaker’s urgent, repetitive insistence that it was because of that book’s “density”. A transparently stupid claim: the book was already sick with padding, relative to […]
The next several decades of undying controversy notwithstanding, the 1946 release Song of the South was a game-changing project for Walt Disney Productions: it was not just a more than fair box-office hit, it was one of the few films that company released between 1942 and 1950 for which that can honestly be said. While […]
Vianney Boncorps donated to the Carry On Campaign to make me review one of his favorite films, trusting that I’d do right by it. And now I owe him thanks for introducing me to one of the finest costume dramas from its decade. The life of 17th Century soldier-poet Hector-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was […]
My deepest thanks to reader Andre Virul for providing me with a copy of this film. Writing about Song of the South is incredibly tricky, because every fiber in my being wants to treat it as one thing, a technologically innovative film and one of the key steps in the development of the Walt Disney […]
Tony Scott’s films, at their worst, are shallow, shiny baubles, all incident and no meaning, aiming to distract the audience by deadening them with a non-stop assault of noise and flashy images. This also describes Tony Scott’s films at their best. The difference between the two poles is one of incredibly subtle degree, and also […]
The title 127 Hours refers to the time 27-year-old extreme outdoorsman Aron Ralston (James Franco) spent pinned by a large boulder to the wall of a narrow, isolated canyon deep inside Canyonlands National Park in Utah in April, 2003, escaping only after he amputated his right hand several inches above the wrist. If that true […]
14 November, 2003: a dark day in the history of American animation. For it was on that date the the animators at the Florida wing of Walt Disney Feature Animation were given their death sentence by WDFA President David Stainton: they were told to immediately halt production on A Few Good Ghosts, the only project […]
There are more than a few bastard stepchildren in the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation; setting aside the projects like Victory Through Air Power and Pete’s Dragon, movies with significant content produced by the Disney animators, that for this reason or that didn’t get tallied up in the official WDFA canon (e.g. the first […]
America’s entry into World War II, depending on which economist you listened to, finally lifted the country out of the last draggy bits of the Great Depression; yet it was not all good news for everybody*. Walt Disney, was among that small population of folks who’d done just fine for himself during the worst of […]
