Tim here. With the Oscar nominations coming in just under a week, this is our last chance to look at the little odds and ends on the list of 20 films submitted in the Best Animated Feature category, and pretend that the race isn’t down to The LEGO Movie and five movies vying for four runner-up slots. And of all the odds and ends, they don't come a whole lot odder than our final subject, Henry & Me.
Henry & Me is a direct-to-DVD feature that finagled a courtesy theatrical release, no doubt in part so that it would show up in articles like this one, and win some free publicity as a calling-card for young Reveal Animation Studios, and raise the profile of a release that’s seeing a healthy chunk of its sales going to charity. The risk of such a gambit is that it relies on the reviewer playing nice with a sweet-minded but rather dim bit of nonsense.
Now, I'’m not nice at all, but it's hard to imagine how forgiving a person would have to be in order to swallow all of the saccharine-coated bullshit Henry & Me shovels. And I'm not talking about the basics of the plot, which are certainly sweet and over-eager to be as family friendly as can possibly be managed, but still basically honest. It concerns Jack (voiced by Austin Williams), an 11-year-old boy who has an undying passion for the New York Yankees, and who's out in his yard playing baseball with his dad when he faints from what turns out to be cancer.
Skip forward, and he's already been in treatment for long enough to lose all his hair, and the time has come for an unnamed but apparently very risky surgery. During the surgery, Jack has a hallucination in which a magical man named Henry (an unnervingly stiff and insincere Richard Gere) takes him through the history of baseball, encouraging him to be tough and never to give up, a metaphor for having a positive attitude during times of sickness about a subtle and elegant as a sockful of pennies to the face. And in case we missed it, it's reiterated by Nurse Cyndi Lauper, mystifyingly nominated for an Annie award for a performance that largely consists of singing a bland "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and a teary ballad version of "Time After Time" (I'm always pro-Lauper, of course, but this belongs on nobody's list of the year's best voice acting)
Did you notice it? I’ll go back. "Undying passion for the New York Yankees". The nominal story about cancer notwithstanding, Henry & Me is the next best thing to a commercial for the Yankees organization, past, present, and future. I would not want to start cataloguing the ways that the film cheerleads for the myth believed by nobody of the Yankees as the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful sports team in the history of athletic activity. It would amount to transcribing the film's screenplay.
Betting everything on the audience's affection, bordering on religious adoration, for what is probably the most-hated team in American professional sports is a miscalculation from which the movie would be unlikely to recover. Betting it all on the audience's rabid love of baseball and baseball history is another. Let us not hide the bleak truth: baseball isn't the young people’s favorite anymore. Individual 11-year-old boys, sure – I am sure that there exist many kids like Jack in the world. But they're certainly not a plurality of all 11-year-old boys.
That's part of the film's secret, which is that it's not really a movie for kids, it's a movie for their dads. Everything about Henry & Me feels archly old-fashioned in the worst way, like being run over by a steamroller made of nostalgia. Its treatment of baseball, its breathless rumination on old Yankee Stadium and the great stars from 90 and 60 and 30 years ago, the way it lingers on old cars and trains and uniforms: this is not the stuff of a movie made for children in 2014. And while the film’s spent a long time in production – it was started back in 2009 – it wasn't that long ago.
Even the visual style is drenched in nostalgia that doesn't play: the film is animated in traditional-style animation that resembles a Disney wannabe from the early 1990s. There are some terrible shortcuts used throughout, like the way most adults' faces seem to be rigidly locked into place as they move their bodies around, and the marriage between the characters and the handful of CGI props, vehicles, and locations is terribly distracting. The film was made on the cheap, of course, and considering that fact, it's not half-bad at making the characters look like they’re feeling things, when they aren’t sporting immobile death masks. Or Jack's hell-red eyes.
Not, then, the stuff of modern children's entertainment, and it's just one more way for Henry & Me to feel like it was finished decades ago and only recently brushed off and tossed out to a marketplace that has no space for it. Mostly, the film is just inexplicable rather than actually bad: noble ideas that have been executed indifferently, fulfilling a demand that cannot possibly exist.
Oscar chances: Lord, no.