In the annals of films with an influence completely disproportionate to their quality or latter-day popularity, the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island stands out as a genuinely iconic work of pop art. I can think of no film that has influenced so many people who have never seen it in such a narrow way: it […]
The worst flaw, by far, of Disney’s new adventure in branding, Maleficent, is that it’s operating in completely bad faith. This isn’t a retelling of the same company’s 1959 animated masterpiece Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of the villain; it’s not a backstory that explains how the villain used to be good before turning […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: with Maleficent, Disney updates a great cartoon from their Silver Age with a dubious live-action update that feels like […]
There’s a very real danger of applying a most peculiar kind of grading curve to Saving Mr. Banks. It’s a movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures, with Walt Disney as an actual character, and it presents him as more of a human being with good and bad characteristics than a plaster saint? He’s seen stubbing […]
Like The Little Mermaid before it, the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Snow Queen” proved quite a trial for Walt Disney Animation Studios, defeating attempts to adapt it as far back at the 1940s. Unlike The Little Mermaid, a solution to the insoluble problem at the core of the project’s development (“how do we […]
Escape from Tomorrow is worse than bad: it’s a soul-crushing disappointment. This film grew from the kind of idea that is only going to work one time – shooting an entire feature film, surreptitiously, on the property of Walt Disney Company theme parks – and it’s goddamn criminal that the best thing that writer-director Randy […]
That there are two animated films in the summer of 2013 which both feature a creature that just wants to race, doggone it, no matter what institutional bias he faces from the powers-that-be because he belongs to the wrong species, and when he eventually manages to make it into the big show, he ends up […]
It’s quite impossible to accuse Secret of the Wings of being the worst Tinker Bell movie, not with Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue out in the world, strutting its stuff. It is, though, not very good at all, ending up almost exactly where I’d assumed beforehand that the whole Disney Fairies franchise was […]
Inasmuch as it’s possible to feel sorry for a movie, I do feel sorry for Pixie Hollow Games. Originally pitched to be the fifth and last of the Disney Fairies features, with a release in 2012, it ended up being swapped with what was then being called Tinker Bell and the Mysterious Winter Woods, sliced […]
I had been warned in advance by many, including regular commenter and generally savvy student of animation Trish, that the third movie of the Disney Fairies line, Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, was thematically problematic. So I was prepared, and ended up finding the movie not as massively irritating as I think I […]
Tinker Bell, the 2008 video debut of the Disney Fairies brand, turned out to be… not exactly good, but a whole hell of a lot better than you’d have any good reason to believe it was going to be. And it was good in ways that argued well for its immediately forthcoming follow-up (you don’t […]
When John Lasseter was appointed Chief Creative Officer for all animated productions released by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he inherited a pair of movies that were reasonably far along in their development that he found to be so completely unacceptable in all ways that he could enumerate, he demanded they be essentially scrapped […]
