Saturdays with Godzilla, a Open Book Blog Hop Post

Welcome to Open Book Blog Hop. You can find us every Monday talking about the writing life. I hope you'll check out all the posts: you'll find the links at the bottom of this post.

Is there a movie from childhood that still holds a special place with you? 

____________________

I enjoyed a variety of television and movies with my family when I was a little one, but I think the ones that give me the biggest warm fuzzies are Godzilla and other kaiju movies, like Gamera and Mothra. 

My dad and I used to watch them together. The silliness of the rubber suits undercut the scariness of the destruction (poor Tokyo--destroyed over and over again).  We'd sit together eating popcorn, laughing and fascinated in turn. Mom would tease us about our bad taste in movies. I have very fond memories of those Saturday afternoons, still in my pajamas after lunch, sitting with my dad, cheering for monsters.

I still love kaiju movies to this day. In fact, I'm now sharing that love with the next generation. A local theatre is bringing all these old films to the big screen again as part of Kaiju-Quest and we try never to miss one!

image source

Godzilla has been reinterpreted and rebooted many times, and through this movie series I'm getting a new view into the craft, politics, and philosophy that underpin these monster flicks. Of all of them we've been the cinema to watch, I think my favorite was Destroy All Monsters! I suspect it's because so many of the monsters were together in a single film. It almost felt like a family reunion (though there's less destruction of landscape at MY family reunions). 

What movies from your childhood still strike a chord with the adult version of you? I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Flirting with Feminism, 1940s Style

Coincidentally, I picked two movies that premiered in 1942 for my watching this week: Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Woman of the Year with Katherine Hepburn. Both are striking for their exploration of roles of women, and both left me frustrated by not quite being willing to go all the way. 

In Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, a woman from a wealthy and respectable Boston family ("Oh, one of the *Boston* Vales"). When we meet her, she is thoroughly cowed by her overbearing mother and deeply unhappy, though her very frustration with her role points to a stronger spirit beneath than sometimes makes itself known. Her story is one of coming into herself. 

In contrast, Katherine Hepburn's Tess Harding in Woman of the Year is a woman very much in charge of her own life, sure of herself and cutting a wide swath in the world as an activist, columnist, and speaker on a variety of social and political issues. Her story is one of coming out of herself a bit. 

Both roles were well suited to these iconic actresses. Who better than Bette Davis to drown us in big, emotional eyes and delivery fiery lines with passion? Who better than Katherine Hepburn to hold tears in a tightly controlled face, resisting the revelations of self laying themselves before her? 

But neither story satisfied me. 

I am wary of stories that romanticize infidelity, due to my personal feelings about marital infidelity, so Now, Voyager had a hard row to hoe winning me over, since a central tenant of the story is the love between a married man and a woman who is not his wife. We're meant to sympathize with the man who made a bad match and is now "trapped" in a loveless marriage (though we never see that wife or marriage for ourselves). To his credit, he was never dishonest about the fact that he was married and had no intentions of abandoning his family and starting anew with our heroine. 

So, one could argue that our heroine knew what she was walking into. I found I had complex emotions, watching the way that they influenced each other while still maintaining separate lives: he returning to the work he loves with her encouragement, she finding confidence to stand up against her bullying mother with his support. Was he an obstacle to her finding happiness with someone else? Or was her own heart the true obstacle?

The story gives Charlotte the opportunity to marry someone else and she turns it down admitting to herself and her potential husband that she doesn't love him. 

What the story doesn't quite make clear is the line between self-sacrifice and self-determination. I could read her eventual care for her would-be-lover's daughter in either light. I've ordered the novel, hoping that I'll get a bit more of the interior life of the main character and understand better why she made the decisions she did. 

In the end, Charlotte made a life for herself that was truly independent, without a mother, husband, or even would-be-lover to tell her what to do, but she still seemed apologetic about it, and I guess I wanted her to embrace it fully. 

That ending line is a honey though, full of ambiguity and poetry.  

(And oh my, how sexy they make cigarettes. I wonder how much the tobacco industry paid for that placement). 

In Woman of the Year, I found myself wondering why two intelligent people like Tess Harding and Sam Craig could ever have believed a marriage partnership between them would work. Maybe it's intended as a lesson about how a sexual charge isn't enough to base a marriage on? (They do really sell that sexual charge, though): 

It's not as bad as Bringing Up Baby where I find myself screaming "Run!" at Cary Grant's Dr. Huxley, hoping he does not get eaten alive by Hepburn's manic pixie dream girl. 

But all the same, Spencer Tracy's Sam Craig seems to be a man who knows what he wants and all signs point clearly to danger! I don't buy that he didn't see it. 

Tess doesn't see him as an equal and shows him again and again that he is not first in her heart, or even second or third, but quite low down the list with things nice to have, but not truly necessary, like a pretty lamp or a pet poodle you pay someone else to walk for you because you don't have time. 

But he marries her anyway. And Hepburn gets her trademark self-realization moment, which she sells beautifully, but at the end I still don't really believe they're going to work as a couple. Honestly, the only thing that holds the romance together is the on-screen chemistry of Hepburn and Tracy, because it's not there in the story. 

While Tess is arguably a feminist character, having built an impressive brand as "Tess Harding," the story falls back on the old saw that ambitious women must feel the lack of love partnership in their lives. Certainly some women (me, for one) want both a husband and a career and manage to have both, but there's nothing in this movie to convince me that Tess ever felt the lack of a husband in her life or wanted to make significant changes to how she lives her life to make room for one. Other than possibly sexual spark, I never saw anything in the story to explain why she wanted him at all. 

One of the keys to traditional romance stories is that the reader/viewer should be cheering for the couple to get together, and I wasn't actually doing that in either of these films. Yet, I liked both main characters and hoped for their happiness. I guess they work for me as sort-of anti-romances. 

If you've seen these films, I'd love to hear what you think in the comments. Same if you have suggestions for other films of the 30-60s with strong female leads for me to check out!

The Uninvited, Revisited

I haven't written about it much here, but I am a bit of an old movie buff, particularly films of the later 1930s to 1950s. Black and white. Classics. I inherited this interest from my mother and throughout my childhood, we watched lots of such films together, whenever they were on TV. 

Off and on for the past couple of years (interestingly: about the same amount of time I've been trying to write my own Gothic romance novel), I'd been thinking about the film The Uninvited, from 1944, with Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, and Gail Russell.  

At first, I couldn't even figure out what movie I was remembering, or if I'd made some kind of amalgamation of several old films in my brain. I have watched and read more than a few things in this genre. 

I remembered that it was Gothic and scary, set in a stunning clifftop home, and some particular images and plot points. It took a bit of doing before I came up with the right search terms and learned the name of it. 

I requested it at my local Retro film series, but so far, they haven't shown it. And it's never on any of the streaming services, so I finally just bought a disk of it, the Criterion edition (a distinction other old movie fans will appreciate). 

I got Sweetman to watch it with me last night. 

I'm happy to report that it held up well. I fell in love with Windward House again, and so wish it were real and that I could go stay in it for a while, scary crashing waves at the foot of the rocks cliff and all. If you're a sucker for Gothic mansion settings like I am, this film is worth watching just for the house. 

image source

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful use of shadows and reflections amped up the atmosphere, and the trick photography used to more fully materialize a ghost still looks classy and "real" if that's an adjective one can apply to a spirit created by camera trickery. 

image source

As one expects in Gothic tales of this sort, there's a terrible secret in the past and it threatens our young ingenue in the present. It's quite convoluted, and I found myself pausing to untangle the threads for my husband more than once (he's less steeped in this kind of fiction than I am). I won't spoil the story here, in case you want to seek this out, but it had all the right elements of betrayal and questionable motivations for this kind of story. 

If you speak Spanish, the fuller story breaks more quickly when our ingenue is briefly possessed by a Spanish-speaking ghost who tells us very directly what happened, but I'm quite sure the film-makers did not anticipate the audience understanding what the ghost actually said in that scene because it all comes out again more slowly. 

A secondary plot took me by surprise. It had probably gone over my head when I watched the film as a child, but really added a level of threat and upped the ante with a side character (Miss Holloway) determined to keep certain secrets buried, regardless of the cost to others because of her obsessive love for one of the deceased characters.  

Shades of Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca, with room in the story that the feelings were mutual this time. Cornelia Otis Skinner's Miss Holloway was a different kind of threatening than Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers, but they might be sisters under the skin. 

Image source left, image source right

Implications of lesbian love were strong in that thread, and not portrayed as healthy and romantic. Holy subtext, Batman! More dangerous obsession, and dark secret sorts of themes.  

I'd love to write something playing in the backstory of this world, with the thwarted love, later love triangle and jealousies, and who exactly that missing father was, or what the grandfather did and didn't really know. The story did a lot with what it didn't tell us, even though it told us a lot. 

I'm also curious as heck about our outside interlopers, the brother and sister (Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald) who pooled their funds to buy the mansion together, only to become embroiled in a local tragedy and haunting. Neither of them married, neither of them seeming to have any particular ties in this world, and unusually close for adult siblings. What past tragedy had they survived together? 

Lastly, I was impressed by the mix of humor and horror. It's always a tricky balance to strike, and bringing in the wrong note at the wrong time can ruin a story, but The Uninvited beautifully blended lighthearted touches with a dark and troubling storyline.  Ray Milland was at his most Cary Grant-like, conveying a lot with a sideways glance or body language, revealing an inner little boy who wanted to run away from the scary things but was held in place by his sense of proper duty as a grown man. 

image source

The final minutes of the film wrapped everything up in a neat bow, delivering two impending marriages, happy pets (a dog and a cat), and every sign that the future will now be rosy for all involved now that the ghosts have been laid to rest. Practically Shakespearean in the rush to matrimony for all involved. It was charming how quickly everyone's future was settled now that we got that pesky troubled past dealt with. If only it were nearly that simple in real life. 

So, if you haven't watched it yet, go check out The Uninvited. It's well worth the watching. 

On Adaptation: Anne, Jo, and Percy

Talking to readers about adaptations of books they loved is like walking through a minefield where anything might blow up, depending on who steps on it. 

Sometimes if I really love a book, I'll avoid seeing a movie or television series made about it because I'm worried they'll ruin it. 

Image Source

And sometimes they have. 

Destroyed it. 

Gotten it SOOOOO wrong it hurts. 

I'm looking at you Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

Then again, I've really enjoyed some adaptations that make significant changes from the source material. 

Two in particular stood out for me recently: 

1. Anne with an E, a series on Netflix from creator Moira Walley-Beckett which was based on the novel Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. 

2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott adapted for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig. 

Neither of these adaptations were religiously true to the source material, yet both of them felt more true to me than other arguably more faithful adaptations.  So, what's the difference? 

Why did changes to Percy Jackson's storyline horrify and offend me, but the addition of entire characters and plot lines to Anne with an E and the out of chronology telling of Little Women feel not only comfortable, but right? 

My theory is that it has to do with finding the heart of a work. What's the emotional core of the piece and of the characters? If an adaptation finds that, then even significant changes are not going to upset me. 

It's a trend I'm seeing in storytelling of this kind, a new kind of line creators are riding where they pay homage to something they love, but also bring it forward to a different or wider audience by changing significant details like time and place, race or background of characters, and even plot. 

Anne Shirley and Jo March are iconic characters, important to many a grown woman who consumed their stories when young. Similar in being women out of their time: headstrong, free-thinking, determined, and passionate. So many women I know aspire in their hearts to be Anne and Jo. And that's the core of any adaptation of these works: does the adaptation convey the heart of the character? 

In both of these pieces, I'd say yes! resoundingly yes! While I have enjoyed other adaptations of these books, this was the first time that I felt fully connected to the characters. The writers who adapted these works clearly loved the books and characters in the same way I do. 

Anne, Jo, and Percy: Yes! Yes! and…Nope.

Anne always was a social justice warrior, fighting for fair treatment for herself and for those around her. In Anne with an E, that becomes a step more overt, with less parlor-talk pussy-footing and more taking action. That meant adding entire plotlines, but I was completely fine with that, because they'd captured MY Anne. 

Jo, too, was fiercely loyal, and struggled with the part she was expected to play in society--docile, obedient, and feminine. She strained at those bonds and sought a life less ordinary, something that fulfilled her and brought her joy--writing!  Gerwig's version of Jo explored her story out of order--juxtaposing moments of childhood against moments of her budding adult life to show us the woman she became that much sooner. (Bonus points, too, for working in the ending Louisa May Alcott really wanted, but couldn't get her publisher to agree to). 

Poor Percy, on the other hand, was transformed in the script from a good-hearted kid who fought feelings of inadequacy into a badass just barely in hiding, needing barely a blink to turn into a heart-throb hero. Sure, that character might have interest for some, but the heart of the boy I'd enjoyed getting to know in Rick Riordan's books didn't make it onto the screen. I don't know who that boy was, but he wasn't Percy Jackson. 

One can only hope that, should I ever be so lucky as to see my work adapted for movie or television, that the show-runners understand the heart of my work and love my characters enough to do right by them. 

How about you? What makes you love or hate an adaptation? Are you a stickler for faithfulness to the original? How do reinterpretations and changes of setting play in your world? I'd love to hear from you in the comments. 

Horror as Comfort

 A lot of people I know don't read or watch horror, and they're surprised to find out that I do. Even more surprised when they learn that I sometimes write it. 

Actual quotes from conversations along these lines: 

• "You don't seem like someone who would write that stuff." 
• I guess? I mean, is horror only for people wearing dark eyeliner and capes? Or just for men? LOL. Some of the scariest stuff happens in mundane settings to people just trying to live their lives--you know: people like me. 
• "It's so dark." 
• It's hopeful and optimistic sometimes. And dark makes contrast, allowing you see the light. 
• "I just can't handle the gore." 
• Not all horror is a slasher film, you know. Some of my horror favorites don't involve any blood and guts at all.
• "The characters make stupid choices." 
• You could say that about ANY genre. If characters don't make ANY stupid choices, there's no conflict and the story is boring. Plus people do stupid things all the time in real life. 
• "They're so stressful." 
• Maybe? I find horror stress-relieving. And tension is kind of necessary for any sort of story. 

image source

It's not that horror doesn't scare me--it totally does! 

Ask my sister about the time I threw the popcorn during a jump scare during a really terrible, not-that-scary vampire movie. Or check out the mangled pillows on the sofa after I squeeze them while I watch something scary. When I was a kid and teenager, I used to read my Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, and horror comics sitting at the top of the stairs with my back against the wall, so I could see anything that might be coming for me. 

But, the things is: the story ends. 

I close the book, or leave the cinema, or turn off the TV. And I am safe. I got that heart-racing excitement, but at no actual risk, other than perhaps the risk of being disappointed by a story that doesn't do it for me. Vicarious experience of the highest order.

And the stories, at least the ones I like best, are stories of resilience and hope. The heroes are not passively watching their lives go by them and wishing things would change--they take action to try to save themselves and others. 

Image source

They *try something.* 

They take steps. Stupid ones sometimes. Foolhardy maybe. But life is risk and that's the heart of horror for me. 

There's something comforting in active characters trying something, especially if I really connected with the characters. 

It's still comforting even when they lose, falling into the zombie hoard after a heroic attempt. They died "with their boots on" so to speak, didn't they? They didn't just melt away on the sofa cushions hoping someone would save them. Those are characters worth admiring! 

What about you? Do you read/watch horror? What are your favorites? 

Wanna check out my horror writing? I had TWO horror stories published this month. 

"The Cleaning Lady" in Stories We Tell After Midnight, Volume 2 grew from a story prompt for the Nightmare Fuel Project and dares to ask who is going to clean up this mess. Dark humor can be so much fun to write!

"His Destroyer" in Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire revisits the Passover story from another perspective, wondering who exactly served G-d's justice on the first-born sons of Egypt during the time of the Ten Plagues. This one gave me chills to write and I hope it will do the same for you when you read it. 

Scary Movie Time: October Movie Watching

If I could spare the time, I'd probably watch a movie a day in October, using Halloween as my excuse to cuddle up on the sofa with Sweetman and my daughters, re-watching old favorites and discovering new ones, while I stuff my face with popcorn. 

Alas, I must keep us in house and home, so a movie a day is not a reasonable thing. 

Still, I do tend to stuff in as many scary stories as I can in October. My daughter, age 13, is a budding horror aficionado, so I have a willing playmate when I decide to try and scare myself silly . . . and I get the bonus of sharing old favorites with my girl. So, here's what I've managed to watch so far this October: 

We kicked off our spooky season watching with The Ring, 2002. It was three of us on the sofa for this one. My husband and I had both seen it, but I don't think we'd watched it together before. The teenager knew quite a bit about the film from seeing it referenced in other social media, but hadn't seen it herself. 

What I remembered was the imagery--who could forget all that horrible hair? And the moment when the evil just crawls out of a television set and into the living room with its victim? When I saw it the first time, I'd hadn't seen much Asian or Asian-influenced horror, so the style was all new to me. This time, that imagery and style felt more familiar, but it was still quite spooky and I still think Naomi Watts is brilliant as the skeptic who becomes a believer and young David Dorfman and Daveigh Chase rocked the eerie child vibe in two very different but equally effective ways. 

The special effects held up pretty decently on re-watch, especially since that feeling of images not quite fitting in the world they are in actually worked for the story. After the movie, we watched the extras, and I have to say that all the cut scenes belonged cut. The story is all the more frightening for NOT explaining things too thoroughly. 

The Others, 2001, is one of those movies with a big twist, and I wondered if it would have good re-play value since I already knew the twist. (No spoilers: I won't reveal the twist here, in case you haven't yet seen this one). 

I'm happy to report that even when you know what's coming, there's still excellent tension. I watched for clues throughout leading to the ending and I found them, but I also found plenty of red herrings that lead the viewer to consider several interpretations of the events they are seeing. My daughter, watching for the first time, gave me no fewer than ten theories about what was happening before we got to the big reveal (none of them correct, BTW). 

Nicole Kidman's portrayal of the fragile-yet-powerful Grace Stewart is the lynchpin on which the movie rotates, but all the performances are strong. I especially loved Alakina Mann as Anne, the elder child, full of big sister bullying, boundary pushing, and a wonderful stubbornness. 

And Fionnula Flanagan as Mrs. Mills stole nearly every scene she was in with her quiet, mysterious manner. Chris Eccleston broke my heart as Charles Stewart, who meeting his wife in a foggy wood tells her in a painfully haunted voice, "Sometimes I bleed." (shiver)

Wonderfully atmospheric and still riveting on rewatch for sure. 

Then, my husband and I watched The Haunting, 1963, together. It's a telling of Shirley Jackson's famous book, The Haunting of Hill House . . .which is not be confused with The House on Haunted Hill, another fabulous old movie featuring Vincent Price, despite the similarity in title (maybe I'll see if I can squeeze that one in this month, too!).  

It's a bit slow as a movie, maybe because it's so exceedingly faithful to the novel, including lots of voiceovers for Julie Harris as Eleanor to show us her fragile and excitable mental state. While I enjoyed the recent Haunting of Hill House television series, 2018, that wasn't a direct telling of the book, but more an update and homage to original work. This older film is for the most part extremely true to the novel--so if you love the novel like I do, you'll appreciate it for that. 

The set was AMAZING, really making use of weird angles and shadows to up the spook factor at every turn. Well worth it just for some of the imagery and creative camera work. 

Finally, the girl and I had a mini movie marathon, watching Poltergeist, 1982, and Hush, 2016 back to back. It's been forever since I watched two movies in a row, and that, in itself, felt decadent. 

My daughter didn't find Poltergeist nearly as frightening as I did when I was a child. Ah, jaded youth.

She hated the "false ending" and I had to agree with her that it wasn't as justified as it had been in The Ring, where the investigator thought she'd gotten to the bottom of the mystery and found there was more to discover. In Poltergeist, we get Carole Ann back and things are calm long enough for the family to pack up a moving truck and then Boom! We're back in the thick of things with no indication of what caused the escalation. You could argue, I suppose, that paranormal happenings don't have to follow logic, but it still made for less satisfying story-telling.

As for me, I'm like, WTF parents? They let their bloodied and traumatized son who had just been swallowed by a monster tree wander the house alone while the parents and teenaged daughter ALL THREE ran around panicking over the missing baby? No wonder he had middle child syndrome. He *really* was invisible, poor boy. 

Hush caught our eye as we scanned movie choices on Netflix with its interesting premise: a deaf/mute woman is being hunted by a killer. The fact that she is deaf is both what helps her survive and what puts her more at risk. She isn't unnerved by some of the killer's attempts to rattle her because they rely on her hearing the creepy sounds, which of course, she doesn't. It was kind of neat, the way the film let the audience hear the sounds, then toggled to a muted version to give the impression of NOT hearing the same thing. 

Both of us felt the film was longer than it needed to be though. It was hard to hold tension for a full movie length when all you basically had happening was a man with a crossbow circling a house and woman cowering within. Maybe it would have packed more tension in a short-film version. We also were both disappointed to never get any kind of motivation explanation for the rando killer who showed up, though we thought he was interestingly chill for a character of his sort. 

I'm hoping to work in some classic monster and a couple of scary films I haven't seen yet. Are you a scary movie fan? What kind do you like? I'd love to see your suggestions in the comments! 

Our Disney+ Project: the 1990s

Disney released sooooo many animated features in the 1990s. It took us a while to make our way through! Check out the list! (we've been using the wikipedia article listing Disney's theatrical animated features in order as our watch list). 

Information/Image Source

There were a lot of these I was looking forward to sharing with my daughter and others that didn't remember as fondly. This is definitely the era where Disney musical movies started to feel more Broadway. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Mulan all have such memorable songs and that comfortable rhythm of meeting a character who wants "something more" or "something different" than what they have and watching them reach out for it. 

• Belle wants much more than this provincial life
• Aladdin wants to stay one jump ahead
• Jack wants a cure for ennui in the form of a new challenge
• Simba wants to be king (or at least he thinks he does)
• Pocahontas wants to know what's around the river bend
• Quasimodo wants to go out there
• Hercules wants to prove he can go the distance
• Mulan wants to like who she sees in the mirror

You'd think we'd weary of the formula, but you know what? We don't. It pulls on our heartstrings every single time. No surprise then that the other thing we loved during this same time span was Hamilton. So glad to have finally seen that show!

Image source

Tarzan stood out among the musicals as the only one when the music was separate from the characters--as in, there was a lot of music, but with the exception of the lullaby, the characters didn't sing it. Instead the songs felt like voiceovers in a way--letting us in on what the characters were thinking and feeling. It worked, too. "You'll Be My Heart" is still an insidious little earworm. 

Our least favorite movies in this least were the ones that didn't really feel like movies, but more like extended versions of television cartoons. We *love* Duck Tales the cartoon series, but the movie was a bit blah. A Goofy Movie tried too hard…which I guess is true to character for Goofy, at least. And Doug's 1st Movie we had to bribe ourselves to finish. 

My daughter surprised me by being down on the Toy Story movies. She really didn't like the animation style, and I do still get the wiggins a little myself with the uncanny valley issues in that series, so I see what she means. Still, I like the friendships among the toy characters. Maybe some of the joy of it is lost on her because the voice actors are not familiar and beloved by her like they are by me. 

Image source

James and the Giant Peach proved again that Roald Dahl is so very weird in all the best ways. We both liked it better once we moved into the animated world inside the peach. Tim Burton was probably exactly the right person to bring that one to the screen, and we enjoyed Jack's cameo as the sunken pirate. 

I didn't remember A Bug's Life all that well. In fact, I had conflated it in my memory with the far less entertaining Antz. So, it was a pleasant and charming surprise in the list. 

All in all, the 90s were an enjoyable era of Disney, even if the sheer number of films was a bit overwhelming and a few offerings were underwhelming. Do you have favorites from this era of Disney? I'd love to hear about them in the comments. 

If you're interested in seeing what we thought of other eras of Disney, check out these related posts:

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Fantasia
• Part Three: The Reluctant Dragon
• Part Four: the early 1940s
• Part Five: the later 1940s
• Part Six: the early 1950s
• Part Seven: the later 1950s and 1960s
• Part Eight: the 1970s
• Part Nine: the 1980s

Disney+ Project: Part 9: the 1980s

More Disney! (See our earlier thoughts here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here)

We've hit a few Disney movies I hadn't seen in this batch. While I remember The Fox and the Hound through a veil of tears, I had never seen The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, or Oliver and Company. I'm guessing it's because I was a young teenager right as they came out. I'm sure I thought I was "too old" for "kid cartoons." Luckily I grew out of that misconception not long after. I was looking forward to seeing Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid again. 

I still know *all* the songs in the Little Mermaid. For me, that's when Disney became a double threat hitting my musical nerd and fairy tale fan buttons all at the same time.

My daughter had seen NONE of these, though she's familiar with the music from The Little Mermaid since our middle school put it on as a musical a year or two ago.

So here's what we thought of 80s Disney:

Fox and the Hound: We knew we were set up for heartbreak from the outset. Heck, Todd's mother didn't last as long as Bambi's! We sat and talked about this one for a while when it was over because it was pretty morally complicated.

The hunter and his dogs weren't just simple villains (though the movie is pretty solidly anti-hunting), but what hope was there for the doomed friendship between natural enemies? And what a bittersweet ending. Way more adult and nuanced than we were expecting.

The Black Cauldron: So, is Gurgi actually Smeagol? The vocal resemblance was uncanny, even down to some of the lines (munchies and crunchies? talking about himself in the third person?) This Disney film had a very different feel than any of the previous ones. It wasn't a musical--no songs at

all, actually. It was darker and more directly scary than any of the others, too. We found it a little sloppy in building character arcs, so lacking in the emotional impact it might have had, but definitely worth seeing. While we enjoyed it, it didn't feel like a Disney movie to us.

The Great Mouse Detective was definitely more for me than for my twelve year old. She knows who Sherlock Holmes is only vaguely, and certainly didn't know about Basil Rathbone, so some of the Easter Eggs remained hidden for her, while I was cackling with inner glee. We both love Vincent Price, though, and he was magnificent as Ratigan. Still she found our Dr. Dawson charming in the same way as The Rescuers' Bernard. A very satisfying little gem we would watch again.

Roger Rabbit, too, was filled with references that went right over my girl's head. She's not steeped in noir like I am. 

On the other hand, she is a fan of old animation, so she had a blast identifying old characters as they wandered through and where they are from. We were both so pleased to see Betty Boop. 

When I watched this one for the first time (when it was new), I had not predicted the big bad guy reveal until just before it happened, and I was pleased that my daughter didn't guess ahead of time either. She's far too good at guessing where a story is going, so she's hard to surprise with a twist!

We were both lukewarm on Oliver and Company. We liked the relationship between Fagin and the dogs, and Sikes was a strong villain, but the whole thing just felt a little lackluster. Maybe too polished? It's the first time Disney used established singers like Billy Joel and Bette Midler as opposed to voice actors. It didn't feel like the characters were singing the songs, but like they were lip syncing, if that makes any sense. In fact, writing this now, a few days later, I can't remember a single song from the film. I guess music is a bigger part of what we love in Disney than I realized. 

That made The Little Mermaid truly welcome. It's the first of a new style of Disney princesses that dominated the 1990s and still continues today: spunky women with agency. 

It really feels like a stage musical, too, hitting all the expected notes: a yearning ballad for our heroine, a gloating moment for the villain, a comedy number (the cook), a setting piece (Under the Sea), etc. 

Instead of the musical numbers being a break from the action as they often were in older films, the songs are the major vehicle for the emotional highpoints. We're only missing the hero and heroine singing their love together, but in most of the screentime they share, her voice is stuck in a seashell, so there are some limits there. 

My daughter commented repeatedly on how strange Ariel looks--giant headed with shockingly skinny arms, ridiculously small waist, etc. I have to agree--even in a long field of unrealistic portrayals of female bodies, Ariel stands out (swims out?) as ridiculously proportioned. 

And, as a Greek mythology buff, my girl was confused by this version of Poseidon, who seems to be less of a god of the sea and more of just the king of the merpeople, but who has some of Poseidon's traditional attributes and powers. 

But we really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to enjoying 1990s Disney with her. 

Disney+ Project, Part 8: the 1970s

More Disney! (See our earlier thoughts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here)

Welcome to the 1970s in Disney animation. We've finally reached films that were made during my lifetime. While Disney has often echoed its earlier work, using the same voice actors or animators or a similar style, that seemed especially obvious in these films, which is something my daughter and I both enjoyed. 

We delighted in hearing Phil Harris (Baloo of Jungle Book) as Thomas O'Malley and Little John; Eva Gabor as Duchess and Bianca; Pat Buttram as Napoleon, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Luke the Swamp Mouse; Sterling Holloway whom we'd already admired as Mr. Stork, Flower, The Cheshire Cat, and Kaa, returning in the 1970s as Roquefort and Winnie the Pooh. 

My daughter is interested in voice acting as a possible future career, so we make special note of those performances and these voice actors were so much a part of the soundtrack of my childhood that I feel that warm and gushy rush of nostalgia whenever and I hear them. 

We also saw a lot of visual echoes, with familiar animal shapes in chase scenes from Robin Hood and the Rescuers, and Cruella de Vil's seeming cousin Madame Medusa. 

Three of our four selections had couples that crossed "class" barriers: Duchess and Thomas, Robin and Maid Marian (in Disney's version, there's no mention of Robin being nobility--he's just some guy), and Bianca and Bernard. 

The music of the Aristocats is similar to the tunes from Jungle Book in the jazz influence, too. My daughter and I enjoyed that "Easter egg" feeling that spotting these connections and echoes gave us. 

In case, you haven't read the other posts, the basic project is that my 12 year old daughter and I are watching all the Disney animated features in chronological order since Dad got us Disney plus this winter. We're using the wikipedia list and so far there have been only a few that weren't available on Disney Plus: Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons, Victory Through Air Power, Make Mine Music, Song of the South, So Dear to My Heart, and The Sword and the Stone (which we found from another source and watched). So, we've watched 23 films so far.

So how do the 70s stack up?

Story-wise, we found these less problematic. While Duchess was a bit of a damsel in distress, Marian and Bianca have serious backbone and a sense of adventure.

The films were mostly free of "ick" moments of leering men and voluptuous women or racial stereotyping or outright offensive portrayals as we'd found in earlier films. They still play well to twenty-first century women like us. We weren't pulled out by outmoded references or outdated humor like we sometimes were with earlier flicks.

Animation-wise, production seemed a little less careful. Thomas O'Malley in the Aristocats looked like a completely different cat in some scenes, especially when he was supposed to be frightened. He changed shape and size throughout. We were pretty sure we spotted some repeated footage in Robin Hood and the Rescuers, like you might see in a Hanna Barbera production, a sign of cost-cutting.

In contrast Winnie the Pooh was highly creative with its use of the text of the books as part of the animation and breaking of the fourth wall as characters interacted directly with the narrator and seemed to know they were in a story.

So far as animation sequences, we loved Tigger sliding down the words on the page when the narrator shook him out of his tree and the opening sequence where a book is opened and all the drawings begin to move. Or when Pooh Bear bounced on lines of text. It was fun how this feature in particular kept reminding you that it was really a storybook.

Even though, she came in to this one expecting she might be "too old" for it, my daughter really enjoyed the sweet stories and fun characters. She thought a lot of the denizens of the Hundred Acre Woods reminded her of her own friends. It's a low stress cartoon that feels very soothing, in the same way that Totoro has been for her throughout her childhood: something you watch when you want something calm.

The 70s get a bad rap sometimes artistically as an era of tacky exploitation and low production values, but we felt these films are still well-worth seeing.

Disney+ Project: Part 7: later 1950s into 1960s

More Disney! (See our earlier thoughts here, here, here, here, here, and here)

At last our Disney+ Project has come to the heart of the films that I remember and love best from my own childhood. All of these were still made before I was born, but there are also all films that I've seen repeatedly, on the big and small screens, on VHS, on DVD, as a child, an adult, and a mother. Lady and the Tramp is one of my earliest favorites, softie that I am for dogs, and Jungle Book was my oldest daughter's favorite--practically all she watched for nearly an entire year when she about two years old.

My youngest daughter had seen Sleeping Beauty, but none of the others.

In fact, until we started this project, she's always been kind of anti-Disney, at least the princesses. When we moved into this house, the room that was hers was lined with a Disney Princess border presumably chosen by another little girl who lived there before her. She was more of a Ninja Turtles girl at the time, and she always hated that border. Although she did have a dress up dress or two that came from the Disney collection, she just never got into the princess culture. She's a rebel that way--liking to find things to like that people are surprised by. (Does that mean she's a hipster?)

Makes her a fun viewing companion for sure.

So, our short-takes on these films:

Lady and the Tramp: Still charming! The spaghetti scene is totally adorable and you knew Tramp was a goner when he nosed that meatball over to Lady. I still cried when Trusty was seemingly dead--even though I knew he wasn't really.

My daughter overall liked it, too, enjoying the neighbor dogs and getting angry at the Auntie who muzzled and chained Lady because she was a cat person and didn't get it. She was also completely charmed by the spaghetti scene.

The Siamese cats are pretty horrifying in the same way the crows from Dumbo were--full of outmoded racial stereotypes. In a movie where all the other animals talk perfectly well, they speak a pigeon English, that coupled with the faux Asian music is truly cringe-worthy.

The 50s definitely left their stamp on the gender dynamics at play. The female is there to tame and civilize the male who will settle down now that he's had time to "sow his wild oats." (insert gagging sound). At least they both do seem genuinely happy at the end, leaving you with a feeling that theirs is a romance that will last. I wonder what Tramp's midlife crisis will look like?

Sleeping Beauty didn't hold up as well story-wise.

Animation-wise, it was really interesting--maybe the most interesting in that regard of this batch of movies. There's a scene where Aurora is laid out after touching the spindle where the blanket and draperies in the room look so real you can touch them, even though the characters themselves don't look any more realistic than past animated humans. "Illuminated manuscript" touches throughout make it a stunner visually (Aurora's hair in some scenes!), and Maleficent in dragon form is still scary!

But there's a lot of too-stupid-to-live going on. Neither my daughter nor I like stories where, in the name of protecting some young female character, we keep her ignorant and isolated. Well, duh! If you don't teach her anything about the dangers surrounding her, of course she's going to fall for it!

Rather than destroying all spinning wheels, how about we teach her about them and directly tell her that it's a bad idea for her to touch one?

Instead of sending her off into the woods to live with three sweet, but incompetent fairies, how about her parents get to raise the child they wanted so very badly? My daughter in particular found that ridiculous. They never actually get to be parents--their child is sent away as an infant and comes back a bride.

If we know her 16th birthday was the danger day, then why on earth was she alone for even a single second on that day? She's a princess, for goodness sake! There are any number of servants, guards, knights, and other kinds of workers that might have intervened.

On the other hand, it was nice that she and her prince met without knowing who each other was and fell in love. Very romantic in that "meant to be" kind of way so appealing in fairy tales.

The three fairies were cute as heck and sometimes very clever (when they weren't being too stupid to live--like going from no magic to spewing magic lights out the chimney while they argued about dress color).

Maleficent is magnificent. (I still haven't watched the live action movies, BTW, because I like Maleficent being evil without explanation; I don't have any desire to learn and empathize with causes or to see her redeemed--sometimes it's good to just have a straight-up, old-fashioned villainous villain!) Eleanor Audley's voicework was stunning--and the kiddo noticed it was the same actress who'd done Cinderella's stepmother. Good ear!

After Sleeping Beauty, it was back to the dogs with 101 Dalmatians.

This might be our favorite of the group, at least for story. From Pongo's match-making beginning to the cross country adventure to save the puppies pulling in an entire network of canines, we were absolutely charmed. How nice that the dogs helped Roger and Anita find one another. The wet handkerchief laughter is such a "meet cute" memory.

And Cruella de Vil? Only the best villain of all time. She totally deserved her song!

This was the first time the credits were interesting. That animated Dalmatian spot grooving to a hot jazz sound? And the best fiction in the whole thing? That after selling one hit song, Roger can afford a country house to keep 101 dogs in!

The Sword and the Stone was our least favorite of the set. My daughter rated it "B for boring." Wart's scratchy voice irritated her, too, and she thought Merlin was worse than useless--actively harmful to the boy he was supposedly teaching.

I liked it more than my daughter did, but I see her point about Merlin. Given that he's supposed to be mentoring the king who became the heart of England, the tutoring lessons seem to only play for comedy with no build-up of any kind of insight or new skill that might help a boy become a powerful leader. I guess he learned that owls are more reliable than old men if you get in a bind? I think he was supposed to learning to use his mind instead of fighting with brawn, but really he just got in trouble and was rescued.

Wart himself suffers from a very sanitized version of poverty and servitude, where despite being worked very hard and mistreated by his foster family, he still buys into their life completely and never becomes angry or resentful about his lot in life. A perfect "grateful orphan" I suppose--the kind one finds in fiction only, because in real life traumatic experiences affect us and a child faced with an entire room full of dishes to scrub doesn't greet them with peaceful acceptance.

There were lots of fun and funny moments, but in the end, it felt like a string of moments and not a cohesive story with character arcs.

It's hard for me to judge The Jungle Book with any kind of objectivity because it was a favorite of mine twice--once in my own childhood and again with my older daughter, who was absolutely obsessed with it as a toddler.

Sometimes, when I am walking around I catch myself humming the tune to the "fetching the water song" at the very end.

My daughter agrees that this was miles above any Disney film so far for the music. Long before we began this project, she was already in love with Louis Prima's "I Wanna Be Like You" which is right up her musical alley. "The Bare Necessities" is irresistible and Phil Harris is one of my favorite voice actors ever. So looking forward to getting to Thomas O'Malley and Little John in upcoming films!

"We're Your Friends" with the vultures is full of lines with double meaning and dark humor that are absolutely delightful.

The movie is a visual treat, too, combining realistic animal movement and gorgeous scenery with slapstick comedy and anthropomorphism at its comedic best.

I guess I still love it . . .though that little girl at the end is awfully grown up for age 9 or so, and enticing the boy back human village life with a pair of long eyelashes had the girl and I rolling our eyes. Hmmmm…looking forward to seeing what she think of Tarzan when we get there. Another man's world vs. animal world with a character who crosses between.

Revisiting all these old movies and experiencing them with my daughter--a total 21st century girl--is an education and a delight. Looking forward to the next one!