Mr & Mrs Incredible

June Wedding (reprinted from the TFE archives)

Helen and Bob Parr were married June 27th, 1989, at the church on St. Pablo Ave. Justice of the Peace Brad Bird presided. The bride is the daughter of Mr and Mrs. Conyers Georgia. The groom is the son of Mr and Mrs Craig T Parr. The bride wore an ivory silk Valenta ball gown. She carried a bouquet of white daisies. Best man was Lucius Best.

The bride is a graduate of Metroville University with a degree in hydrocarbon polymerology. She currently serves the public as a superhero. The groom also performs heroics. They plan to continue incredible crime fighting and reside in downtown Metroville.

[excerpted from the Municiperg Tribune, June 27th, 1989]


Happy 22nd anniversary to Mr & Mrs Incredible! (If Pixar must be in the sequel business, The Incredibles are beyond the most deserving, wouldn't you agree?)

"Brave", We Need You

Behold the blurry teaser poster (courtesy of Pixar Planet) for Pixar's Brave an original story with their first female lead "Princess Merida"

I normally wouldn't post a blurry advertisement, but having just seen Cars 2, I'm going to rub this teaser all over me for soothing balm. I need this one to be great. Cars 2 stinks (more later) and the Toy Story short that proceeds it "Hawaiian Vacation" is also soul-crushing. Oh Pixar, you said farewell to these characters so beautifully last year. You had a whole world weeping under 3D glasses and then you bring the whole gang back instantly for such a disposable mediocrity? What are we going to do with you? We depend on you! Love - a concerned fan since that bootleg viewing of Tin Toy in the 1980s.

"Who Will Rescue Me?"

I'm lost at sea without a friend
This journey, will it ever end?
Who will rescue me?

So... goes the ballad that opens The Rescuers (1977), as Little Orphan Penny drops her message in a bottle into the swamp. I swear Shelby Flint's vocals dribbled out over the sides of my television like syrup. Who will rescue me from this treacle?!?

It wasn't always this way with The Rescuers and me. In fact, as a child it was one of my favorite movies. (When you voted for it in a poll some time ago, I was excited to revisit it!) As it turns out, sometimes childhood loves are best left in childhood.

Has this ever happened to you with an old formerly beloved movie?

As you can see in the still above, the animation team let the texture of the canvas bleed through and for a few seconds as the movie kicked off I thought "how lovely" (I'm not always so pleased with today's beautiful and shiny but often sterile animated images) but as the movie progressed it turned out not so lovely at all, a mess of inconsistent animation that often looked rushed through production.

For those who need a refresher, The Rescuers is about a girl named Penny who has been "borrowed" from her orphanage by a pawn shop owner named "Medusa" (wicked highly enjoyable voicework from Oscar regular Geraldine Page). Medusa wants a gargantuan diamond called The Devil's Eye which is buried in a cave that Penny is small enough to slip into in a creepy place called Devil's Bayou. Penny's bottled cry for help reaches the Rescue Aid Society, an international organization of ethnically and geographically stereotyped mice who meet in the United Nations building: HIGH CONCEPT!

While the characters are cute enough -- particularly elegant rodent Bianca (Eva Gabor) and a dragonfly named Evinrud -- the primary emotion that The Rescuers seems to be going for is pity. It works but "pity" isn't the most cathartic or endearing emotion to rest a whole movie on. Penny is either too young, too dumb or too helpless to be carrying this picture. The other significant problem is that despite a scant 78 minute running time, there's not enough plot to fill it with. Time and again we have a plot complications that are as thrilling as treading water. The narrative doesn't actually move until the complication is over. Like so:

1. Oh no, the mice are in trouble.
2. Cue frantic activity on or offscreen!
3. Whew, the mice are okay. So...
4. Back to the plot where you left it. Proceed.

And let's not even talk about the excessive amount of time we spent with the albatross Orville [yawn]. He's mere connective tissue to take you from Act 1 (New York) to Act 2 (Devil's Bayou) and last time I checked no intermission between acts ever lasted as long as Orville's fumbling flying routine.

The pictures sole bright spot then is Madame Medusa.

Seeing the movie as an adult, it's shocking to realize that she's nearly a carbon copy of Cruella de Vil: She enters the picture throwing open a door violently; She loses her temper constantly; She drives like a madwoman in vehicles that leave huge puffs of smoke behind them; She has a bumbling human henchman she despises; She has a one track mind (fur/diamonds) and she even has a scene where she slows down her "car" creepily while searching for the hiding protagonist, that immediately brings the famous "soot" scene in 101 Dalmatians to mind. When she's not recalling Cruella she's lifting Miss Hannigan from Annie.

In other words, she's no original.

Disney Generations: Cruela begat Medusa begat Ursula.

But if we needed Medusa as a missing link evolutionary step to get us from Cruella to Ursula than we owe Medusa a bag full of those diamonds she covets. Movie buffs have long noted that Disney has two types of villains: rotund or spindly. Medusa splits the difference, her arms and legs are skinny and her movements scream "bony villain" with their sharp angles, yet her body is saggy and slovenly. You know she's not the slip of a thing that she used to be. In 10 more years, she'll be a big as a house(boat). 

Though I can no longer claim I have any affection for The Rescuers, I still completely dig Medusa and her darling crocodiles Flotsam and Jetsam.... I mean, Nero and Brutus! They're keepers. Or at least placeholders until Ursula, Flotsam & Jetsam arrive 12 years later for The Little Mermaid.

The Rescuers: C
Related Posts: Beauty & The Beast and 101 Dalmatians.

X-Men: First Adaptation

Andreas here. In his recent review of X-Men: First Class, Nathaniel pointed out how movies keep trying to master "television's most powerful asset (long form storytelling) without having the right equipment by which to master it (weekly hour-long episodes)." This is exactly why, to my mind, the most successful adaptation of the X-Men comics to date wasn't directed by Bryan Singer, and doesn't have a numeral after it. It's the Marvel/Saban-produced X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran for 76 episodes in the mid-'90s.

Like many superhero-themed TV shows, X-Men: TAS served as a "greatest hits" compilation, compacting decades of comics storylines into dense, bite-sized portions. It showcased some of the comics' most thrilling narrative arcs and most terrifying villains, like Apocalypse and the Sentinels. While the X-Men films have only scratched the surface of most characters, reserving the vast majority of screen time for Xavier, Magneto, and a few privileged others, the animated series had time to explore its mutant ensemble, devoting whole episodes to individual crises.

Better yet, X-Men: TAS used its guise a kids show (complete with lasers, spaceships, and time travel) to introduce a new generation to a range of social issues: institutionalized oppression, harassment, self-loathing, political assassinations, police states, and more. It was covertly progressive and slyly written in ways that are still impressive today. The show ended its run over a decade ago, yet its main authority figures (who doubled as bad-ass warriors) were a black woman and a disabled man.

So while I'm still excited to see X-Men: First Class, I doubt it'll top X-Men: The Animated Series, which embraced and exploited its source material's superpowered soap opera. (It was also my childhood gateway drug into the nerdy world of superheroes and comics, so that nostalgic attachment helps.)

I'll close with my big wish as a cinephile and animation junkie: why can't we get more high-quality, feature-length, animated superhero movies, à la Batman: Mask of the Phantasm? Bad example, I guess, since that was tragically unprofitable... but the idea's still good! I'd definitely pay $8-10 to see X-Men: The Animated Movie on the big screen. Oh, and Marvel, while you're catering to my dreams: can you please bring back the Sentinels?

What dreams would you like Marvel to fulfill?

Introducing... Princess Merida

For what seemed like 17 weeks, I kept receiving 'character intro' emails introducing each new set of wheels for Pixar's Cars 2. That's Junk Mail! Even if you're one of those peculiar people who really loved Cars, could you possibly care enough to need weeks upon weeks of rollout images of sad descendants of Herbie the Love Bug (I'm sorry but Herbie > Cars) prior to release? I keep trying to pretend that Cars and its sequel don't exist so that I can enjoy the happy mass delusion that Pixar has never made a dud. Why do they have to make it so hard with the constant marketing. Don't make me think about Cars 2!

Here's a character worth getting a first good look at as seen at the Daily What. It's Princess Merida from BRAVE which will open on June 22nd, 2012.

Yay! She looks a bit like Lil' Orphan Annie but with pupils and warrior skills. And Sandy the dog is a big black horse.

Okay, they don't look a thing alike but we love the gingers at the movies. They're like one big feisty sorority with Julianne Moore as the head sister. Nicole Kidman is constantly having to go through initation and hazing all over again since she can't commit to the red.