In January of 1910, flooding struck the city of Paris. Water saturated the earth and flooded through storm drains, pipes, catacombs, and the Metro, inundating the city for several weeks. Citizens of Paris were forced to travel by boat or build wooden walkways too and fro, while hundreds struck out for refugee camps on the hills like Montmartre, where the famed Basilique du Sacré Cœur was nearing completion. And, in the cinematic world created by Bibo Bergeron, a monsterous man-sized flea won the hearts of Parisians through song.
Nostalgia for idealized visions of the past is pretty much the motivating ethos of this blog, devoted to Scientific Romances, adventure stories, history, and aesthetics of the Victorian and Edwardian Periods. In what is widely considered one of his best films in years (if not decades), Woody Allen gives his own take on nostalgia in Midnight in Paris. With Owen Wilson in the lead role that once would have been his own, Allen explores both the motivations and the complications of too readily losing oneself in the past with sensitivity and gentle humour. In a film that seems like it is directed almost exactly at me, I don't come out feeling hectored or made fun of. Instead, it is a film that I can watch again and again.
Trailer for Midnight in Paris.
Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a Hollywood screenwriter unfulfilled with the drivel he is forced to write for modern audiences. He longs to be a real author of authentic literature, like his idols of the "Lost Generation." The so-called Lost Generation were those youth who came of age during the First World War. Some were young enough to have served, others narrowly escaped that horror, but all shared the challenge of having to find themselves and their life's meaning in a world where the notion of inevitable upward progress had died in the trenches. Paris was a hotbed of activity for artists of the Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, William Faulker, T.S. Eliot, and Pablo Picasso, many under the watchful eye of Gertrude Stein. Assuming that Gil is the same age or younger than Owen Wilson, that would place him in Generation X, another "lost generation" between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials currently engaged in mutual recriminations. Perhaps that is part of why the Lost Generation resonates so well with Gil. Pursuing his nostalgic ambitions, Gil finds himself in Paris on a vacation with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her conservative parents who disdain the French (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy).
Where Gil's vision of Paris is the sultry music of 1920's cabarets and walking in the rain, Inez's mostly has to do with shopping. Inured to her fiancee's wistful dreams, she is very forthright in how he should give up the silly dream of being a poor author in Paris and accept his role as an affluent Hollywood screenwriter. Her dream is to live a lavish but shallow existence in Malibu. While in Paris, the pair meet up with one of her former professors (Michael Sheen) and his wife (Nina Arianda)... A pretentious couple whose presumptive authority on the arts is only matched by their inability to really appreciate it on a visceral, emotional, human level. Art, for them, is not something to be felt or experienced. It is something to be "discoursed" for social status among fellow pseudo-intellectuals. He reaches peak pedantry when attempting to debate a tourguide at the Rodin museum on the particulars of Rodin's life. Gil, naturally, finds all this insufferable, being more deeply engaged in with a Cole Porter 45 found at a flea market stall than in a professor's rambling monologue of questionable accuracy.
After Inez decides to go off and the spend the evening with the professor and his wife, a drunk Gil stumbles around Paris' back streets. At the stroke of midnight, a vintage 1920's Peugeot automobile pulls up beside him. Its Flapper passengers beckon him in, and Gil is transported away to the Twilight Zone.
Midnight in Paris itself offers a nostalgic, idealized look back at the Lost Generation as archetypes rather than well-fleshed out characters in their own right. Gil becomes a spectator to the broken relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, played admirably by Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill. Corey Stoll plays Ernest Hemingway with intensity (and most of the best lines in the film). Adrian Brody has a memorable cameo as Salvador Dali, in a comic scene where he, Man Ray (Tom Cordier) and Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van) are totally unfazed by Gil's explanation of his situation because they are Surrealists. As icons more than characters, each delivers a wonderful performance.
The situation Gil finds himself in, which needs explanation, is that through successive visitations into the past - at the expense of nurturing his unfulfilling present-day relationships - he falls in love with the charming Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the (fictional) muse of the Lost Generation who was painted by Picasso and went off to Africa with Hemingway. She is also a woman out of time, in her own way. Like Gil she also longs for another time... Not the vacuity of the 1920's, but the vibrancy of Paris in the Belle Époque. Maxim's and the Moulin Rouge are where she really wants to be, rubbing elbows with Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaugin, and Degas.
Allen doesn't vilify or mock nostalgia. That is left to the pedantic pseudo-intellectual. Nor does he really offer any rule or prescription for life's uncertainties, except to embrace them through courage and the pursuit of our passions. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the beautiful things of the past so long as they inform rather than replace the present, making our lives better in the here and now rather than make the here and now even more unsatisfying. As Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) says in the film: "We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artist's job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence."
Eventually, in the course of their time-twisting shenanigans, a horse-drawn carriage swings by at the stroke of midnight to convey Gil and Adriana to the 1890's. After meeting Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaugin and Degas pop in and discuss their conversation on what time they think was the "golden age." After some thought, they agree that it was the Renaissance. Woody Allen gives his characters everything anyone who has held out a torch of nostalgia could want: not only the ability to go into the past, but to do so under the social and economic conditions that are most amenable, with nobody wondering at your strange clothes or manners or lack of money, and everyone speaking modern English. After all, nobody would want to go back to the Victorian Era to live in a slum. Gil gets to go back to the Twenties and actually meet his idols, Adriana gets to go back to the Fin de siècle and meet hers. But they are also confronted with the irony that every age is nostalgic for another. In every time, there is an envy for an imagined golden age of the past. So will Adriana stay in her golden age? Will Gil give up his golden age to be with her, or will he choose to remain in the Twenties? Or will he yet return to his own time to live his own life there? Could she be content in the Twenties with him? Or can she take a truly brave step into an unknown future?
Paris is a supremely appropriate setting for a film raising the question of our relationship with the past, because Paris is a city where the past carries an almost palpable weight. This may be the mere whimsy of a Canadian whose home town is barely over 100 years old (for a Parisian it might just be "Saturday"), but the sense of history in Paris is as heavy as the stones which built the great city. The steps of Notre-Dame de Paris are worn away with centuries. You can touch by hand the statues carved by great masters. Standing in Place de la Concorde, one can almost hear the guillotine and see the blood seep into the ground. More than anywhere, Paris lives and breathes its past.
This fact benefited the production of Midnight in Paris as easily as it did the narrative.
It doesn't take much to restore a Paris streetscape or a restaurant to its 1920's appearance when it was already half a century old by the 1920's. In some rare cases, Paris' overabundance of museums helped to recreate what had been lost. Another memorable scene at a carnival was shot at the Musée des Arts Forains in the old winemakers district of Bercy. Gil is having the time of his life dancing up to the hottest Twenties tunes when he meets up with Adriana, who explicates on the beauty of a pedal-powered carousel from the 19th century.
Like so many films set in Paris, Midnight in Paris cannot but be an ode to the city itself. In addition to overt monologues in worship of Paris ("You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can't. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists..." "That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me." "This is unbelievable! Look at this! There's no city like this in the world. There never was.") Allen takes care to showcase the best of the city in loving montages and scenic shots. It resonates with anyone who has been there and fallen in love with the city, or anyone who loves to hear people talk about the passions that enflame them.
Today's special post comes by way of the 2021 Classic Literature on Film Blogathon. Click on the banner above for more interesting articles on the cinema's sometimes tense relationship with literature!
Published in 1894 as a series of moralizing fairy tales for his daughter, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book is a classic of adventure literature. For those of us raised on cinematic versions it can be surprising to learn that Mowgli's exploits comprise a relatively small portion of the book. In fact, they are drawn from only three chapters. Absent are the white fur seal Kotick, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose, and even Akela the proud wolf whose name was officially lent to the leaders of Cub Scout packs. Yet it's the stories of Mowgli that have most inspired filmmakers and audiences for generations: a reiteration of the "wild man" myth that has endured from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Tarzan of the Apes.
In 1954, Walt Disney set about proving the mettle of his studio and Science Fiction by producing one of the first great genre epics of the post-war era, turning to Jules Verne to supply him with the setting and outline of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That, in turn, inspired a lengthy series of Victorian Scientific Romances rebranded as Atomic Age parables that stretched until the end of the Sixties, running parallel to the more modern Science Fiction of the time. However, after the Summer of Love, the global protests of 1968, the Stonewall riots, the Tet Offensive, and the moon landing, the heady days of ray gun adventures and cautionary atomic optimism were passed. In their place came a strange affectation for pessimistic, deromanticized films whose ponderous lengths and turgid performances somehow gave the impression of profound meaning, no better exemplified than in the first truly large-scale, full-colour, big-budget Science Fiction epic since 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
An instructive comparison can be made between the two. Above all else, 2001 is a film about the emergence of consciousness. First, we see the emergence of primate consciousness in the "Dawn of Man" sequence and the connection between consciousness, technology and the violent struggle of survival. In the middle section, which contains the only part of 2001 that may be considered a story, we see the emergence of technological consciousness as HAL 9000 gains sentience and repeats the violent struggle for survival. Finally, in "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" we see the emergence of stellar consciousness as a state of being that cannot be described, only show in slit-screen effects over footage of Monument Valley for half an hour. Yet all of Kubrick's brilliant cinematography is a disingenuous construct, meant to disguise the fact that the entire movie is conceptual. It is a 161 minute depiction of a theme without any meaningful ideas, and certainly very little that approaches anything like a story or characters. Kubrick asks us to be in awe of the technical spectacle of 2001, accepting that the spectacle in-itself comprises something kind of like a philosophical idea.
By contrast, 20,000 Leagues possesses not only a theme (atomic power), but an idea (how atomic power should be used responsibly) conveyed through an impassioned human drama. Whereas Kubrick may be the greater artiste, Disney is by far the greater showman. He no doubt recognized that you can't carry a 121 minute movie on theme or even ideas alone. A concept is what gets you started, a foundation upon which you build a movie and not the movie itself. Therefore the idea of atomic power's responsible use underlies an actual story about a trio of men who are taken captive aboard Captain Nemo's submarine ship... A story overflowing with human drama, tragedy, action, and charismatic personalities. It is a heartily Romantic, passionate film. Even the settings are richly Romantic, from the beauty of the ocean to the opulence of Nemo's salon. 2001, on the other hand, depicts the vast expanses of the cosmos as listlessly dull. All the ballet music in the world cannot bandage the gaping wound in which space, spaceships and even whole planets are stripped bare of anything interesting. With newly expansive stellar consciousness pushing beyond the infinite, all Dave Bowman sees are infinite dead worlds not unlike the dessicated desert that was Earth at the Dawn of Man. Though trying to communicate space as a place of infinite growth and possibility, Kubrick somehow only succeeds in making space looking really boring. It is no wonder, after 2001 and its offspring like The Andromeda Strain, Soylent Green, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, THX 1138, Blade Runner, and Alien, that the original Star Wars should have been such a huge hit. Its return to a Romantic vision of space begat a string of genuinely well-loved Science Fiction films through the Eighties and early Nineties, like Back to the Future, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, E.T., Aliens, The Terminator and Terminator 2, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, and even, God forbid, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
In between were the 1970's, and though those dusty old Victorian Scientific Romances were put back on the shelf, a few attempts were made to revive the genre, with varying degrees of success.
It was very appropriate, and most likely unknowingly so, that Disney set 2001's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, in 1914. Indeed, in many ways it could not truly have been otherwise: the middle Victorian era saw the beginning of an explosion of interest in the lost continent that would not subside beneath the waves again until the 1960's. In the decade spanning 1895 to 1905, there were no less than 16 fiction novels, standing alongside countless ostensibly non-fiction pseudoscientific and spiritualist explorations, which solidified the Atlantis we know today: not as a holdover of ancient myth, but as an artifact of Victorian cultural anxieties.
Today's special post is part of the second annual So Bad It's Good Blogathon. Click on the banner above to see rousing defenses of other films, ranging from the unfairly maligned to the hilariously terrible.
One of the biggest challenges faced by Disney in the past decade was trying to recapture the magic of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and appeal to the young male demographics. 2010 saw Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tron: Legacy, both of which under-performed and under-impressed. Pirates of the Caribbean returned in 2011 with On Stranger Tides, an attempt at a second series that sputtered out. That was followed in 2017 by Dead Men Tell No Tales, which also went nowhere. Disney completely threw John Carter under the bus in 2012. The company's ineptitude at either creating big budget franchise tentpoles or marketing them properly eventually lead to them buying out Lucasfilm in 2012 for the guaranteed moneymaker of Star Wars... Only to drive that one into the ground too. After adjusting for inflation, The Force Awakens (2015) is the 11th highest grossing movie of all time, The Last Jedi (2017) is 44th, and The Rise of Skywalker (2019) is 94th. Their only consistent success has been Marvel Studios, purchased in 2009, which may have succeeded in spite of Disney rather than because of it.
Tucked into that decennium horribilis was 2013's The Lone Ranger. The Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator currently shows a critical approval rating of 31% and they immediately declared it a flop after it pulled in second to Despicable Me 2 on opening night. When it came to Disney summer adventure movies of the 2010's, critics seemed more zealous than usual to ordain themselves the gatekeepers of culture who can make or break a film with the tap of a keyboard. Mark Hughes of Forbes decried the media as "flop-hungry," and it is hard to disagree with him given the histrionics critics have engaged in. Gilbert Cruz of The Vulturedecrees that it "Represents Everything That's Wrong With Hollywood Blockbusters," San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle calls it "the biggest stinker of 2013" and Lou Lumenick of the New York Post audaciously declared it "the worst [Western] — and then some." On the contrary, The Lone Ranger was considerably better than most movies of 2013 and, far from being the worst Western ever made, it's not even the worst version of The Lone Ranger. I have worse Westerns in my own home video collection! Such insensible, immoderate, hysterical criticisms betray the fact that The Lone Ranger is actually a very enjoyable movie in the vein of 1990's costume adventure films like Tombstone (1993).
Perhaps critics were unprepared for the fact that it is predominately a comedy, or perhaps they were unprepared to have to think about it thematically. The Lone Ranger, drafted by the same creative team as Pirates of the Caribbean, pokes at the corniness of the original radio and television versions in addition to genuine attempts to reach out to the tastes of modern audiences. In doing so, it can become corny in its own right, with a wink and a nod, proving that it isn't poking at the original Ranger in a mean way. On the contrary, to fully understand the subtext to this film, it helps to have a working knowledge of the original.
Our story opens in a carnival in San Francisco in 1933, the same year that The Lone Ranger debuted on radio. A young boy, clad in Hollywood cowboy style complete with Lone Ranger mask enters a Wild West show, out of which pours the music of Gene Autry. The carnival barker promises that the exhibit will take visitors back to "the thrilling days of yesteryear," another recall to the introduction of the radio show. Inside are mostly static displays of buffalo and grizzly bears, dusty relics of a bygone past. One display, however, features a living "Noble Savage"... An aged and decrepit Tonto, who proceeds to tell the boy the true story of the Lone Ranger.
Not long into the film we come to understand that Tonto - who has traditionally been represented as a "Noble Savage" archetype - is an unreliable narrator, raising the question of how much of the true story of the Lone Ranger is really true. The boy himself tries to remind Tonto (or convince himself) that the Lone Ranger is just a made-up character. A key point in the film is that Tonto is emotionally scarred from the childhood trauma that connects directly to his desire for revenge on Butch Cavendish. Cherokee elders relate the story to John Reid, the Ranger's alter ego, believing that Tonto's mind is broken and that his perception of the world is skewed. At least it would explain why he keeps trying to feed the dead crow on his head, or why he wears one at all. Supernatural, "Weird West" elements are layered throughout The Lone Ranger, but these are all called into question. Are they real or imagined by Tonto? Is the Lone Ranger real or imaginary? For that matter, is Tonto even real or was he also imagined by the boy?
Consequently, the film calls our attention to the act of Western myth-making and sets about, in its own way, to deconstruct how cultures recollect and reinterpret their own history (including a self-deconstruction of the very act of making cinematic reboots, which is the sort of self-awareness I haven't seen since the South Park movie being a satire of the controversy the South Park movie would generate). The reality of western settlement in the United States has been layered over and over again by myth-making and faulty recollection, due exactly to film, television and radio. Not only them, but even the people who lived it, as with Buffalo Bill Cody's wild west shows, Ned Buntline's dime novels and the paintings of Charlie Russell. From Washington Irving to Walt Disney, the United States has always been a myth-making culture that reworks and retools its own history to communicate a certain ideal, however divorced that may be from fact. Everyone knows about the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere and Washington crossing the Delaware, but not about the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that was a proximate cause of the Revolution. The Royal Proclamation recognized Indigenous peoples as sovereign nations, thus forbidding the conquest of Native lands, instead requiring legal land surrender by treaty. Everyone remembers to remember the Alamo, but doesn't remember that Mexico was actually in the right in that conflict. Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, William Travis and the Texan settlers were essentially foreign insurgents whose motivations included maintaining a slave economy outlawed by Mexico. It is common knowledge that the Wild West was settled by the gun, less well-known that the average annual homicide rate per city during the period of western settlement was two, and that gun control was strictly enforced in towns. The Gunfight at the OK Corral was instigated by the Clantons and McLaurys flouting the ordinance not to carry firearms in Tombstone, and three people died. Illegally carrying firearms was the second most common cause of arrest after drunk and disorderly conduct.
Given this, The Lone Ranger did hold out the threat of imposing upon us that uniquely American version of the hero's journey, where the limp-wristed, educated intellectual must learn that the only way to decisively resolve conflict is with bloodshed. Theologian Walter Wink dubbed this story form the "Myth of Redemptive Violence," dating back at least as early as the Babylonian Enuma Elish of 1250BCE. In that classical myth, the god Marduk creates the cosmos by stretching out of the entrails of his slain foe, the dragon Tiamat. American history invites - almost requires - adherence to the moral framework of the Myth of Redemptive Violence, since the American Revolution is as concrete an historical realization of the myth of Tiamat and Marduk as is possible. The United States has a particular version of this myth which reinforces the ideal of the rugged, individualistic, gun-toting Republican type against the effete, intellectual, legalistic Democratic type. Our introduction to John Reid is his sitting on a train reading John Locke's Two Treatises on Government. During the first big train robbery action scene, we also find out that he eschews firearms and is a lawyer.
Thankfully the film retains its composure and adherence to the original character, whose ultimate goal was justice. Not justice taken into one's own hand, but the justice of due legal process. Though he grows into a more model American toughguy, the Lone Ranger still possesses the ethic that he is an agent of civilization, even when being so requires being an outlaw (which also fits in with the American fetish for the criminal class, from Old West outlaws to Depression-Era gangsters to easy riding bikers to inner city gangstas). This new version also hews closely enough to the established origin of the character, complete with that infamous ride of the Texas Rangers into the canyon and the silver mine which would furnish a near endless supply of silver bullets. The origin of Silver is distinctly different, as required by the ambiguous supernaturalism imparted by Tonto.
Silver, the horse, is a fantastic actor and frequently steals the show. Armie Hammer is adequate in a role more clearly written for Brendan Fraser circa The Mummy (1999), and Johnny Depp does much to act his way out of the fundamental ickiness of casting a white actor to play an Indigenous character. The ambivalence of his playing Tonto is, I think, handled as well as one can hope by how Tonto is written. Because he is emotionally traumatized and mentally broken, he is not intended to represent a typical "Indian Brave" or "Noble Savage." His being in the Wild West show's display as a specimen of the "Noble Savage" is lampshading how Tonto has traditionally been portrayed. He is allowed to break out of having to portray Native Americans as a whole and permitted simply to act the character. Between them, the Lone Ranger and Tonto have a fun and lively dynamic that chews more scenery than did a taciturn Ranger and a stoic Tonto.
Some legitimate criticism pointed out the gratuity of some crude humour and violence. It seems that simply killing someone is no longer quite bad enough in a cinema environment glutted with zombies, starship disasters, planet-destroying lasers, and literally snapping half of the universe into nonexistence. Now the cold-blooded killers have to eat their victim's remains just to prove that they're really bad guys. Despite being needless, the acts of cannibalism were written well into the plot and fitted with the film's supernaturalism and theme of nature being out of balance. I suspect more would have been made of nature's imbalance had not major parts of the script been excised when Disney brought down the fiscal hammer during production. Lost were genuine werewolves, necessitating the iconic silver bullets.
It would also have been too easy to play the Lone Ranger for laughs. As a product of a bygone age reinterpreted into an atmosphere of identity politics, it would have been seductive to make him the butt of a joke... That white men are stupid and old things are funny because they're not modern things. That is blessedly not the case, even though it is mostly a comedy with some very dumb moments. Any fun that is poked at the Lone Ranger or his race earns the climactic payoff when John Reid owns his masked identity, takes off on Silver's back, and Hans Zimmer's arrangement of the William Tell Overture hits the octane. It's an origin story after all. It has to end with the hero rising up to become the legend admired by our young boy in 1933.
The catastrophic reception of The Lone Ranger was unfair, but it wasn't as disastrous as, say, John Carter's. The box office failure of John Carter ended any conceivable plans to continue with the trilogy implied by Burroughs' books. While The Lone Ranger's failure does deny us any further adventures with this particular duo of Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the film itself acts as an origin story for all preceding versions of the characters. The boy in 1933 is clearly a fan of the radio show and film serials (1938 and 1939). Those begat the television show (1949-57), science fiction-inspired cartoon (1966-68), and other media. The purpose of this film is to highlight, lampshade, and deconstruct the origins of the character itself, to tell his "true story" after nearly a century of radio, television, cartoons, and film. As such, Disney's The Lone Ranger does stand alone, which works handily after the professional critic class were done with it.
Today's special post is part of the Time Travel Blogathon hosted by Wide Screen World and Silver Screenings. Click on the banner above to see more excellent time-tossed movie reviews.
A recurring theme in The Twilight Zone is the existential angst of the modern male. Its canon of episodes is replete with middle-age guys who just can't catch a break, who just can't keep up with the pace of life in the jet age. The most famous is Henry Bemis, played by Burgess Meredith in the classic Time Enough at Last (1959), a henpecked bookworm who just wants to curl up with a good story. A well-timed outbreak of nuclear war does a fine job of taking care of distractions, but as you can imagine, there is always a catch in... The Twilight Zone.
Rejection of the modern day for the allure of the past was a recurring exploration of this theme. It was played comically in Once Upon a Time (1961), starring Buster Keaton as a man from the silent film era who trades places with an inventor from the 1960's, both discovering that the grass is not always greener on the other side. A more serious, and heartbreaking, exploration of the idea came with A Stop at Willoughby (1960), penned by Rod Serling himself. It was later adapted as a television film, For All Time (2000) starring Mark Harmon and Mary McDonnell. Richard Matheson, writer of many Twilight Zone episodes including Once Upon a Time and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1963), delivered his take on it for a 1975 novel Bid Time Return. That was, in turn, adapted to cinemas as Somewhere in Time (1980) starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In both For All Time and Somewhere in Time, the alienated modern man seeks love and fulfillment in the Gay Nineties, with varying degrees of success as lovers and as films.
Paul Grimault's Le Roi et l'Oiseau took nearly 30 years to complete, a labour of love and story of artistic passion that typifies the work of France's most renowned animator. After seeing the film on its release in 1980, and known in English as The King and the Mockingbird, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were inspired by everything that animation could be. Studying it assiduously, the lessons learned fueled the creation of their own studio, Ghibli. He is the direct ancestor to celebrated animators like Sylvain Chomet, his work an antipode to his contemporaries in the United States. Le Roi et l'Oiseau, and Grimault's body of shorts, demonstrate a keen, European sensibility and experimental approach that still astonishes today.
Grimault's work is to Walt Disney as Franco-Belgian bande dessinée are to American comics. Both have their place and one, thankfully, does not have to choose between the two. Any serious student of animation should have little patience for the view that Disney is inferior simply because it is popular or musical or familiar. Yet there are palpable differences between the two producers. A sensitive reader knows the subtleties of tone and art separate Tintin, Asterix and The Smurfs from their closest American cousins, not to mention the work of creators like Moebius or Jacques Tardi. Grimault exactly shares this quality, his work being effectively a bande dessinée come to life.
For the incidental benefit of those who cannot speak French, Grimault makes little use of dialogue and embraces the art of motion with beautiful, even lyrical, animation. From a strictly technical standpoint, his rubber-band human figures are flawed but those flaws lend style and charm. His painted backgrounds are astonishing works of imagination and draughtsmanship inspired by countless Continental reference points. His rendition of a fairy tale - Hans Christian Andersen's The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep - lacks the dynamism, excitement, musical numbers and character tropes of a Disney fairy tale, but feels more authentically European for all those reasons.
The Disney company was faced with challenging times throughout the late 1960's and 1970's. Walt Disney passed away in December of 1966, leaving the company rudderless. It never truly recovered from a loss in the fiscal year of 1959/60, after which it resorted ever more to inexpensively produced, live-action films with equally diminishing returns. The list of truly classic Disney films from the Sixties is short: Mary Poppins (1964), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Pollyanna (1960), The Parent Trap (1961), and The Love Bug (1968). The Seventies were even more barren. The world changed around Disney, and by the discontented years of Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Sexual Revolution, Uncle Walt's 1950's utopian promises and quaint family movies were painfully square. Up to 70% of the company's revenue came from its two theme parks - Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida - and a growing majority of its films were theatrical re-releases of past glories.
Something daring was necessary, and it was in this spirit that Disney turned to a distinctive little adventure book written by Ian Cameron in 1961. Titled The Lost Ones, it featured an expedition to the Canadian Arctic that uncovered a mysterious society descended from the Vikings who migrated across the Atlantic a thousand years before. Though set in the modern day, producer Winston Hibler, director Robert Stevenson, and script writer John Whedon saw in it the seeds of a grand Victorian-Edwardian adventure in the tradition of Jules Verne. After all, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea proved to be a landmark film for the company in 1954, so perhaps a similar sort of story could propel them into success once again. An aspiring Imagineer by the name of Tony Baxter seized the opportunity to propose an entirely new addition to Disneyland centred on both this film and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Yet studio executives got cold feet, scaled back the budget, and when The Island at the Top of the World was released in 1974, it was not the hoped-for commercial success. The film, a planned sequel, and Baxter's ideas were quietly shelved.
Because of the media savvy of most citizens in the West, thanks to growing up, as we have, with a constant glut of cinematic cliches, it is often easy to accurately assume what a film is going to be like. If we are told, for example, that it is a children's film, then we will often rightly figure on something happy and trite and sugary in its sweetness, and just about as filling as candy. If we can see that it is done in a medium such as Claymation, we may jump to that assumption right away. Now and then, however, we may find our assumption to be altogether mistaken. Indeed, we may find what is ostensibly considered a children's movie that shocks us, not from any snide cynicism or brutality that has come to pass for kids' entertainment, but rather by its profound intelligence and sensitivity. Such is the case with the Claymation animated feature The Adventures of Mark Twain.
