11/30/15: Tubby Little Cubby All Stuffed With Fluff

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A.A. Milne, animated films, Barbara Luddy, based on short stories, Buddy Baker, cartoons, childhood favorites, children's movies, Christopher Robin, cinema, classic films, Clint Howard, co-directors, Disney movies, Eeyore, favorite films, film reviews, films, friendships, Gopher, Hal Smith, Howard Morris, Hundred Acre Woods, John Fielder, John Lounsbury, Junius Matthews, Kanga, Movies, multiple writers, nostalgia, Owl, Paul Winchell, Piglet, Rabbit, Ralph Wright, Roo, Sebastian Cabot, Sterling Holloway, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Walt Disney, Winnie the Pooh, Wolfgang Reitherman

If nostalgia is a drug, then nostalgia for the beloved things of one’s childhood must be a triple-dipped, skull-peeling hit of the purest intoxicant in history. We tend to view our childhood favorites through the rosiest of spectacles for many reasons but I like to think that the most prominent is also the simplest: we hold the movies, TV shows, music, pop culture and culinary delights of our childhood up as examples of the pure, undiluted joy that comes from youth. Before we learned to be cynical, snarky and dismissive, before we developed “guilty pleasures” and ironically “liked” things, we were simpler, more naive and quite a bit easier to please. It’s a convenient lie that children are universally accepting of whatever crap is put in front of them: in reality, they’re just a lot less afraid to look like idiots.

Once one is removed from childhood nostalgia by some distance, however, re-examining those childhood loves can be a bit tricky. Fart jokes, inane songs and talking animals are pretty much par for the course with kids’ movies but, several decades down the line, those particular cinematic affectations are a bit more of an acquired taste. It’s tempting to look down at our childhood loves from a more “adult” perspective and laugh at our immaturity while still pining for those innocent, pure emotions of our youth. It’s tempting, of course, but it still does them a disservice. Rather than give these old favorites the equivalent of a golf handicap and a lifetime pass, is it actually possible to re-examine them and determine their respective merits?

As a youngster, I had a set group of rotating favorite films, many of which I would watch not only day after day but, at times, multiple times during the same day. Of these many childhood favorites, few resonated with me as much as Walt Disney’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977). If I watched that remarkable little film once during my formative years, I probably watched it at least a hundred, if not a thousand, times. Thirty-some years later, however, would this little gem still mean as much? Is The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh nothing but a sad, wistful reminder of a simpler era or does it still possess the same ability to delight modern children as it did those of us who grew up in earlier eras? Is there really a place for the “tubby cubby” in our modern world?

For the uninitiated, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh details the travails of the titular stuffed bear and his woodland friends as they pass the time in their magical home, the Hundred Acres Wood. Created by British author A.A. Milne in the mid-1920s, Pooh and his friends would go on to capture the imagination of generations of children in the fifty-some years between their creation and the vibrant Disney adaptation that we currently discuss, becoming iconic childhood figures along the lines of Paddington Bear, Babar or Charles Schultz’s legendary Peanuts gang.

Characterized by a sweetly philosophical, gentle tone, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is the very antithesis of frantic, overly manic kids’ movies, landing somewhere closer to a more subdued version of the aforementioned Peanuts. The adventures detailed here-in are about as far from the complicated machinations of modern animated films as possible: Pooh needs to find honey; Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit’s door and needs to get out; Owl’s tree falls down and he needs a new home; Tigger needs to find out what, exactly, he’s good at. No self-referential layers of meta-commentary here, nor allusions to popular culture of the era or anything transitory: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh deals with the most basic of emotions and tropes, such as the need to help others, the importance of sharing, the importance of friends, the bittersweet feeling of leaving your childhood loves behind as you get older. While many animated films claim to be for both parents and their children, that’s usually more perfunctory than anything else. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is one of the few children’s movies that is just as impactful to parents as it is to their progeny…even more, perhaps, similar to the recent Inside Out (2015).

There’s not a lot of chaos here, controlled or otherwise, but the film also doesn’t need it. It’s the difference between listening to an orchestra perform a classical piece or listening to a prog-thrash band ratchet through several time changes in the span of minutes: they both serve their purpose and there’s a time and place for both. A frantic, slapstick pace just doesn’t suit this kind of thoughtful, contemplative material. There’s a reason why Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh became a minor hit upon its release: Milne’s creations may be the single best example of Zen philosophy ever committed to film, animated or otherwise.

How does The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh hold up to other “Golden Era” Disney classics? Remarkably well, as it turns out. The voice-acting is superb across the board: I’ve never imagined Pooh as being voiced by anyone other than Sterling Holloway and I never shall. Likewise for Paul Winchell’s exuberant Tigger, John Fielder’s quivery-voiced Piglet, Junius Matthews’s blustery Owl and Howard Morris’ whistling Gopher. These are the definitive versions of these characters, as definitive as Lugosi’s Dracula or Karloff’s Monster. The songs are strong and, likewise, indelible: I don’t think I’ve ever got “Pooh’s Theme” out of my head since the first time I heard it and the “Heffalumps and Woozles” setpiece stands as my very favorite animated sequence ever, aside from “A Night on Bald Mountain.” And “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers”? Try and get that little worm out of your brain.

The animation style ably mimics the actual illustrated stories, leading to some truly lovely images, not least of which are the many times when the stories bleed back onto the page (and vice versa). Aesthetically, The Many Adventures of Winnie Pooh is easily one of my favorite Disney films: something about the look and style proves as calming, today, as it did back when I was a child. It’s also a perfect example of “form” and “content” meeting in harmonious unity: despite being comprised of three separate stories, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has a flowing sense of continuity that’s practically fluid.

Needless to say, I loved the film as much upon my recent viewing as my prior ones. Stripping away all of my resident goodwill for the movie, however, there’s still that all important question: is The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh really a great film or does it just mean a lot to me? With as much impartiality as I can muster, I’m going to come down on the side of a genuinely great film.

For one thing, the film is actually a lot deeper than I gave it credit for when I was growing up. Upon this recent viewing, lots of little details and notions popped out at me that I never really considered before: Pooh is actually a really selfish, self-centered character and kind of a jerk, lovable demeanor or not; Eeyore is clinically depressed, yet completely accepted by his friends; the introduction of Tigger is framed like a horror movie (this was a big revelation, actually); there’s something strangely subversive about Rabbit drawing faces on Pooh’s butt in order to make his derriere fit the accommodations; Eeyore giving Piglet’s house to Owl is a really shitty move but Piglet going along with it is an act akin to sainthood or Communism, whichever you prefer. Like I said before, that’s a lot of subtext for a kids’ movie.

The single most important reason to ascribe greatness to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, however, is also the simplest: 38 years after its release, the film still feels fresh, timeless and like it has something to say. These notions of friendship, sacrifice, unity and melancholy resonate just as much today, if not more: as an adult, I’ve had a chance to live with all of these feelings and emotions for decades and, yet, I relived them all when I sat down to watch the film again. Any film that can consistently make you feel, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, is something special: in every sense of the word, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is special.

As mentioned in the beginning, nostalgia can be a hell of a drug: it can blind us to the inherent deficiencies of things we used to hold dear, reducing any attempt at critical analysis to a simple shrug and “Well, I liked it when I was a kid.” Not all of our past loves will pass the “smell test,” so to speak, especially if we’re being brutally honest with ourselves. When you find a childhood love that does, however, like The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, my advice is to hold on to it for dear life. A life without cherished memories like this, you see, is really no life at all.

 

8/24/14: A Fistful of Nuts

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animated film, animated films, bank robbery, based on a short, Brendan Fraser, cartoons, cinema, film reviews, films, Gabriel Iglesias, Gangnam Style, heist films, Jeff Dunham, Katherine Heigl, Liam Neeson, Maya Rudolph, Movies, nut store, nuts, Peter Lepeniotis, Sarah Gadon, self-sacrifice, squirrels, Stephen Lang, Surly Squirrel, The Nut Job, Will Arnett

There are few things in this world that I openly detest quite as much as overly referential animated films, ala Shrek (2001), although films like Scary Movie (2000) and Disaster Movie (2008) are certainly right up there. My big problem with movies like this (aside from the fact that they’re usually obnoxious, shrill and prone to induce seizures in anyone younger than 20) is their undue reliance on “of-the-moment” pop culture references: a few months (or even weeks) after films like this are released, they’re instantly dated and feature no staying power whatsoever. It’s similar to SNL skits that are based on recent celebrity faux pas and “current affairs”: these incidents may have relevance at the moment but who’s going to care in a month, let alone a decade?

I begin with this disclaimer by way of saying that Peter Lepeniotis’ The Nut Job (2014) almost lost me before it had a chance to grab me. Within moments of starting the film, I was treated to my first pop culture reference (albeit an extremely dated one): the heroic squirrel Grayson (Brendan Fraser) smirkingly remarks to another character that “Chicks dig the tail.” Not only was this roughly the millionth tired variation of the Batman & Robin (1997) bon mot that I’d been treated to over the years but it also managed to come almost twenty years too late to be anything more than a complete head-scratcher: do people still remember Joel Schumacher’s Batman films, especially in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s extremely popular modern reboot? More importantly, does anything really care enough to be tickled by another stupid reference to an already tedious film?

I say “almost lost me,” however, because The Nut Job manages to pull off a rather nifty hat trick: it nimbly straddles the dividing line between “cheeky, good fun” and “hyperactive kiddie fodder,” coming out quite handily on the side that doesn’t tend to make me see red. In many ways, The Nut Job reminds of recent films like Free Birds (2013) and The Croods (2013), although it’s a solid step down from either of those movies. Nonetheless, there was enough good stuff here to keep me utterly engaged all the way up to the end credits, wherein an animated Psy appeared to shake his pixels to his mega-hit Gangnam Style: it probably says a lot that not even the ultimate gratuitous pop-culture reference could spoil the good will that the film earned.

The Nut Job concerns the misadventures of Surly Squirrel (Will Arnett), the disagreeable loner with the “all about me” attitude. Surly lives in one of those giant cinematic urban parks that seem to consist of miles of unspoiled trees, pristine ponds and general pastoral beauty. The rest of the park’s resident animals, including the aforementioned Grayson, Andie (Katherine Heigl), Mole (Jeff Dunham) and Buddy the Rat (Rob Tinkler), are ruled by the iron-fisted Raccoon (Liam Neeson), a smooth-talking “Tammany Hall”-type politician with a hidden agenda. When Surly’s newest scam (stealing a mobile nut cart) backfires and leads to the destruction of his fellow animals’ winter food storage, the angry animals banish the rapscallion to the terrifying wilds of the city proper, the worst punishment that any of the animals can imagine.

Once in the city, alone but for the continued friendship/servitude of his mute buddy Buddy, Surly happens upon a little bit of nirvana (nutvana?) in the form of a nut store, seemingly run by the same shady fellas that ran the doomed nut cart. Turns out that these fellas, Fingers (James Rankin) and Lucky (Scott Yaphe), are a couple of gangsters working for King (Stephen Lang) and the mysterious, mute Knuckles: they’re all playing to use the nut store as a front for breaking into the bank next-door. In a cute bit of symmetry, Surly plots to break into the nut shop in the same basic way that King and his gang plot to break into the bank. When Andie and Grayson show up, however, looking for food for the rest of the park animals, Surly is forced to reexamine his standoffish ways and must decide whether to swallow his pride and help those who’ve exiled him. As Surly will learn, it doesn’t take anything special to look out for number one but it takes a whole other kind of animal to selflessly look out for others: it takes a hero.

While The Nut Job features a witty, tight script, its two greatest strengths are, without a doubt, the exceptional voice acting and the eye-catching computer animation. While I’ve always been a huge fan of the traditional cel-style of animation (think the classic Disney films), I’m gradually warming to the more recent computer animation of films like the aforementioned Free Birds, The Croods, Rango (2011) and ParaNorman (2012). When done well, these films can look quite beautiful (if slightly colder than more traditional animation styles) and The Nut Job is no exception. Indeed, the scene where the animals’ storage tree burns is quite wonderfully evocative, almost artistic in its destruction. Nothing about The Nut Job looks cheap, which really helped to pull me into the story.

The biggest boon for any modern animated film is its voice cast, however, and The Nut Job features some real winners. While Arnett is a slightly less interesting presence here than in his live-action performances (or the animated Bojack Horseman, for that matter), he’s still a commanding performer and utterly magnetic. I’ve, personally, never been the biggest fan of Katherine Heigl, but was completely taken with her Andie: she brings a refreshing measure of common sense, trepidation and strength to the character that makes her not only an interesting character but a pretty good role model, to boot…not a bad trick for a “kid’s movie” to pull off. For my money, however, the real pick of the litter this time around has to be Liam Neeson: the veteran actor (now action star, apparently) rips into his role with absolute gusto, turning in one of the most bravura performances of a pretty bravura career. Neeson is having so much fun as the nefarious Raccoon that it’s completely infectious: I found myself grinning from ear to ear whenever he showed up to spread his pretty poison about and the climatic battle with Surly is a complete treat. My only complaint with the voice cast at all, to be honest, is with the relative lack of Fraser as the boneheaded, heroic Grayson: there just wasn’t enough of him here, making the character come across as woefully underdeveloped and strictly one-dimensional. This, of course, is a tremendous pity, since Fraser is one of the few human actors around (Andy Serkis being another one) who almost seems more of an animated character than a flesh-and-blood person.

Ultimately, I found a lot to like about The Nut Job. The film is vibrant and kinetic, yet manages to downplay the hyper-active pop-culture references that manage to sink similar films (at least as far as I’m concerned…Shrek’s massive popularity seems to bespeak of a much more tolerant attitude among the general movie-going populace). The voice talent is top-notch and the film is full of nicely orchestrated, suitably tense action scenes and set-pieces. I also really liked how the film manages to serve as commentary on our current superhero-obsessed culture: despite Surly’s position as park savior, the film is really about how self-sacrifice is necessary to the continued survival and evolution of our communities and societies. Surly doesn’t truly find happiness until he sets aside his own selfish needs and feelings and works towards the greater good: I’m not suggesting that I completely believe in this kind of “feel-good community activism” but it sure as hell beats the “every man/woman for him/herself” tact by a country mile.