Honourable Mentions

So as long as I'm doing the "Top 15 Disney movies I grew up with" reviews to kick off this blog, I might as well clarify the list of movies that I consider to be the ones from my childhood, and quickly acknowledge the gems I've had to leave out. The point of this series is to weigh out the nostalgia factor of movies I always enjoyed to the extent to which they hold up as I review them now, ten years later. Obviously there are a bunch of Disney movies I didn't see as a child or only saw once or twice, which I can't really judge from a nostalgic point of view. But since then I've seen nearly all of the old Disney movies, and also some of the new ones.


Here is the list of the official 15 movies I AM reviewing in full for this series (though the order in which I place them shall remain a surprise). To call this a "top" 15 list is a loose interpretations, considering there were only about 15 I remember seeing a lot as a kid.

• Snow White (1937)
• Cinderella (1950)
• Alice in Wonderland (1951)
• Peter Pan (1953)
• Sleeping Beauty (1959)
• One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
• The Sword in the Stone (1963)
• The Aristocats (1970) - which I've already done as #15
• Robin Hood (1973)
• The Little Mermaid (1989)
• Beauty and the Beast (1991)
• Aladdin (1992)
• The Lion King (1994)
• Pocahontas (1995) - which I've already done as #14
• Mulan (1998)

So right now I'll just mention the best Disney movies I DIDN'T grow up with and talk about their merits now that I've finally seen them. Apologies for the ones I left out because I haven't seen them or don't like them. Dumbo is one I need to see. Hercules, The Emperor's New Groove, Treasure Planet and Atlantis are ones I don't hold in such high regard. They're fun flicks, but the quality of Disney movies seems to have suffered in the 00s.

Let's go in order of release, shall we?

Pinocchio (1940), like Snow White, this one's pretty amazing considering how long ago it was made. I only got to see part of it once, I think. Overall a pretty good time.

Fantasia (1940), I remember watching this once or twice as a kid and thinking it was quite boring due to the fact that it has no story. It's basically an art piece, a collection of short animations put to music. When I watch it now, I appreciate so much better. It's become one of my favourites, simply because it's so beautiful and perfectly put together. Fantasia 2000 can eat its heart out.

Bambi (1942), a beautifully simple one that will make you cry, for the best reasons.

Lady and the Tramp (1955), there are better ones, but the simplicity of this one is also just nice.

The Fox and the Hound (1981), a great movie though it drags at times and could have been done better. It manages to get a great message about prejudice across without being too preachy.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), I hate the obnoxious gargoyles, but I love everything else. Absolutely breathtaking imagery and orchestral pieces. The Hellfire sequence is one of Disney's best.

Tarzan (1999), an excellently animated movie. Tarzan's relationship with the gorillas was kind of cliched, and as was the greedy villain and the bumbling old professor, but I love Jane.

Lilo & Stitch (2002), pretty nicely done considering it seems a bit weird for Disney to do a movie like this. I particularly love Lilo and her sister's relationship. Not so fond of Stitch...

The Princess and the Frog (2009), a nice return to the traditional animation style and a clever adaption of the fairy tale in old-timey Louisiana, though the plot was kind of overcomplicated.

Tangled (2010), undoubtedly my favourite Disney film of the 21st Century. The characters are either remarkably deep or delightfully simple, and either way very likeable. The plot takes twists and turns you don't see coming and some of those action scenes are the best-animated I've ever seen. Rapunzel was handled perfectly; not too helpless but not too amazonian. I'm having trouble thinking of any flaws at all.

Frozen (2013), probably the number 2 of the 21st Century. Brilliant and breathtaking for all the same reasons as Tangled, though I just wished they spent more time on the amazing main characters' development and less time on singing ice-workers and snowmen. It should have just been longer. But I guess that's a good criticism to have.

And that's it! Can't wait to release the next review!

Top 15 Disney films I grew up with, #14

#14: Pocahontas (1995)

Pocahontas is not based on a novel or a fairy tale, or some random story from nowhere. It’s based on a true story about a Native American girl who strove for peace between her tribe and 17th-century British settlers. Here I stress the word “based”. Like Aristocats, this film only scrapes the top fifteen because of its sentimental value to me as a child. That was before I knew a thing about British-American history, or could recognise the numerous plot-holes and poorly developed characters. This movie was Disney trying to follow up the success of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin with a more “au naturale” Disney princess. Sadly, all they really got was a one-dimensional environmentalist who, following the trend, constantly sighs about how she wants “more”, whatever the hell that means in her pretty paradisiacal context.

Pocahontas seems to be one of the only Disney movies in which the historical inaccuracies cannot be forgiven. This is probably because the Disney boldly proclaims it as a historical film, even giving it a date – 1607 – in the opening song and accompanying text, but does an extremely poor job at following up with any historical accuracies whatsoever. They pretty much get three facts right: John Smith sails to America. White people are dicks to natives. Pocahontas saves John Smith from angry tribespeople. I think the writers just stopped there in terms of historical research.

I know it’s a kids’ film, but I will always be disappointed at the lack of effort to make this a good representation of the true story of Pocahontas – who was twelve at the time, had to actually work to learn English and diplomatic skills rather than use magical spirit powers, and did not fall in love with the first white man she saw. Apparently Disney even shunned the living remnants of Pocahontas’s tribe when they offered to help bring some cultural accuracy into the movie. Brother Bear did an excellent job at representing native American culture. Why couldn’t Pocahontas? All they covered was the idea of arranged marriage, which is a pretty culturally generic idea we’ve seen a million times before (hint: Aladdin). Disney sticking feathers on peoples’ heads, putting them in canoes and giving them weird accents is not good enough. The British also don’t accurately represent the British and their attitudes at the time. Virginia with its moose and very high cliffs is definitely not Virginia, unless the state has undergone a drastic environmental change in the last five hundred years. And don’t get me started on how the natives and the British seem to resolve all of their issues at the end, and how the British know nothing about how gold is found, and certainly nothing about this continent that had in fact already been explored by Europeans for over a hundred years. A complete whitewashing of history. Genocide as a concept was handled very well for a children’s audience in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Why couldn’t this movie pull it off?

Historical reality notwithstanding, there were aspects of the film that I enjoyed as a child and still enjoy today. The characters are, as in The Aristocats, two-dimensional and uninspiring, especially the two leads Pocahontas and John Smith. The Native Americans are just generic natives doing generic native things. The villain is a typical fop; an effeminate, rich, greedy white guy who's also kind of a baby. While Radcliffe is not a bad villain, Disney has done the same kind of villain so much better with, for example, Scar in The Lion King, Captain Hook in Peter Pan and Radagast in The Great Mouse Detective.
The songs in this movie range from okay to good, which is more than I can say for The Aristocats. Just Around the River-bend and Colours of the Wind are among my favourite Disney songs, and the natives’ song at the opening credits has always made me want to dance around a totem pole. At times the visuals are stunning too, particularly in Colours of the Wind with its flowing pastels and Savages with a dramatic scale reminiscent of (though incomparable to) the scale of The Lion King. This last song makes me laugh now, because one of the lyrics is “They’re not like you and me, therefore they must be evil” which really, really simplifies the conflict between the races, but is surprisingly quite true. Usually I equate this to Pocahontas. Artistically and musically, it’s pretty amazing, but in terms of the message it sends when compared to actual events, it’s pretty disturbing.

While it has many infuriating flaws, Pocahontas is relatively enjoyable, despite the boring characters. I’d have no objection over renting this out for my hypothetical children, though I would have to not watch it with them because I would just make fun of it the whole time. As kids’ movies go, it’s not bad. It at least sends good messages within its totally inaccurate context. But I would give it a lot less stars now than I would have when I was little. Like most of these lower-ranking flicks, the nostalgia factor doesn't quite make up for the fact that it is, in general, a mediocre film.

(image source: http://www.disneystoryoriginspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/pocahontas1.jpg)

Top 15 Disney films I grew up with, #15

There are a lot of great things about childhood, and I’m sure there are many who would say that Disney made their childhood. It certainly made mine. The films I remember loving most when I was little, and even love now in late adolescence, come from Disney. One cannot deny that they have made a huge contribution to the history of not just animation and kids’ movies but the film industry in general.

The following list is my personal opinion on films that I grew up with. It was hard to make a top ten list since they are all so close, and there were about fifteen that I primarily enjoyed, so it’s the top fifteen. I also wanted to criticise the much worse films on this list. You may notice that other great Disney films like Bambi and The Hunchback of Notre Dame do not occur here. I have watched films such as these recently, and I think they’re fantastic as well. Also, to be clearer, I am talking about feature-length films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, so Pixar sadly doesn’t count. Honourable mentions go to more recent yet equally beloved Disney movies like Frozen and Tangled, which are thus far my favourites of the 21^st Century. But these were the ones I remember loving and watching all the time when I was little. And so, naturally, my judgements have been based a lot on these films’ sentimental value. So, without further ado, enjoy this list, which will be added onto as the posts pile up.

#15: The Aristocats (1970)

Given this Disney movie was the very first to be made after Walt Disney’s death, I find its quality … forgivable. Sadly, The Aristocrats started a downward spiral leading to The Black Cauldron (widely considered in the worst Disney animated feature of all time … but everyone thankfully forgot about it). The Aristocrats is set in Paris around 1910, and it’s about these cats who are expelled from their nice home by an evil butler and have to find their way back. Let’s be honest. I don’t really fully like this movie. As a kid, the only things that attracted me to it were the occasional side characters that came in for cheap laughs, like the old man with the loud car, the annoying geese and the bumbling dogs, and also the fact that it’s set in Paris.

It’s the same thing with Thumbelina, which I liked as a kid but absolutely loathe now. If you throw in Paris and a couple of French words, suddenly it’s all dandy and magical, even though the characters and the plot have absolutely nothing to do with the setting. If it weren’t for a couple of nice shots of what Paris supposedly looked like, I would think this was just set in America or Britain. The countryside is generic and there’s nothing special to how people behave that makes the film feel at all French. The town in Beauty and the Beast, made twenty years later, has a more convincing French charm, but this movie seems to be throwing in the Paris card because it’s the only way to make the movie more than a mundane one about lost cats.

But that’s just me being anti-Americanisation. I understand The Aristocats is made for an American audience, but this really might as well have been set in America. Other than that, the songs are either unmemorable or annoying, the characters are pretty two-dimensional and the plot is quite predictable and drags at times. I watched it a lot as a kid because I had the video, but overall I dislike it now, and almost wish my parents had stopped me from watching this as a child in favour of the large amount of much better Disney films. I do have friends who love it, though, and I will remind them of the fact that this is purely subjective. Parts of the movie, like the song Everybody Wants to Be a Cat, do have their merits, even if they don’t quite hit home for me, though I do agree that the kittens are pretty adorable. But the Aristocats, objectively, is a lot better than the next movie, even though I personally have given it a higher ranking. Probably because I have a lot more to say about it.

(image source: http://www.soundonsight.org/wp-content/themes/arts-culture/timthumb.php?src=http://www.soundonsight.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Aristocats-door.jpg&q=90&w=630&zc=1)

Welcome to an exercise in compartmentalisation!

Hi everyone! Just a quick welcome to this blog, which will be me reviewing randoms stuff whenever I feel like it. At first it'll be mostly Disney and other nostalgic stuff. But I'll keep adding onto it as I see new movies and read new books etc. I enjoy the critical side of writing, and this is my way of exploring it more. Please enjoy!