MICROCOSMOS

A Bug's Life is the most readily-overlooked of Pixar films, and I'd be lying if I pretended that I couldn't figure out why. After a decade and a half of riches, the 1998 film (the studio's second feature) can't help but seem unduly modest in every aspect of its writing. The story is perfectly ordinary - it's yet another riff on the basic Seven Samurai model - the jokes are largely ordinary and a bit shticky, the characters go through the most expected possible journeys. But it is a greatly important film: it's where Pixar proved that it had something to it besides novelty, and that the enormous success of Toy Story in 1995 augured for a real lifespan for this whole fully-rendered computer animation thing. Indeed, A Bug's Life was only the third CGI animated feature made in America, and would have been second if Jeffery Katzenberg wasn't hellbent on beating it to theaters with the transparent knock-off Antz, the first of many "fuck you" Valentines he'd deliver to the Walt Disney Company with his new DreamWorks Animation.

It's not true, of course, that A Bug's Life was the gatekeeper that needed to succeed for any and all further Pixar films to exist; Toy Story 2 was already in production, after all. But A Bug's Life did prove that Pixar's creative trust had the chops to be more than just a Toy Story factory, and demonstrated the studio's commitment to constantly challenging itself. Technologically and stylistically, the transition from Toy Story to A Bug's Life is probably the single biggest leap in aesthetic quality made by any individual Pixar film: while the 1995 picture shows its age in every implausibly smooth wood surface and rigid piece of cloth (to say nothing of its hideous human characters), A Bug's Life still looks pretty great out of a few aberrations here and there, most notably the surface texture of some of its insect characters, and generally feels like the baseline from which all of Pixar's subsequent triumphs have developed, much more so than Toy Story does.

That said, the studio's films are at least as beloved for the high quality of their storytelling as for the beauty and complexity of their images, and this is where A Bug's Life simply can't hold pace with most of its successors, though this speaks more highly of Pixar's run of masterpieces from 2001-2010 than it diminishes A Bug's Life in any particular way. Born out of the legendary lunch meeting with Pixar's top heads pitching the ideas that would make up most of their output through 2008's WALL·E, A Bug's Life's story, credited to John Lasseter (who directs), Andrew Stanton (who co-directs), and Joe Ranft, centers on an ant colony on a small island in a dry riverbed, where we meet the standard-issue ambitious outcast with ideas too big for his hidebound community, Flik (Dave Foley), whose attempts to make life better for all have been hell on Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), currently in the last stages of taking control of the colony over from her aged mother (Phyllis Diller). When Flik's latest invention manages to destroy the entire food offering the ants have left for the tyrannical grasshopper leader Hopper (Kevin Spacey), Atta and the other ant leaders are more than happy to ship Flik off on a mission to find warrior bugs to defend the colony, hoping to keep him out ofthe way while they work double-time to accede to the grasshoppers' demands.

In the big city - a collection of boxes outside of a trailer - Flik finds no warriors, though he thinks he has: instead, the band of lost souls he stumbles across are the refugees from a crappy circus run by hapless P.T. Flea (John Ratzenberger, Pixar's good luck charm). These include angry male ladybug Francis (Denis Leary), sad sack walking stick Slim (David Hyde Pierce), upbeat black widow spider Rosie (Bonnie Hunt), hammy magician Manny the praying mantis (Jonathan Harris) and his assistant/wife Gypsy the moth (Madeline Kahn), hungry caterpillar Heimlich (Ranft), sweet rhinoceros beetle Dim (Brad Garrett), and incomprehensible pill bug twins Tuck and Roll (both voiced by Michael McShane). Under Flik's leadership, they concoct a plan to fight the grasshoppers, and all the beats you would expect turn up: Atta and the rest learn of the deception, Flik becomes a greater outcast than ever, Hopper doubles down on his demands, and eventually Flik is able to redeem himself by saving the day.

In the most abstract strokes, this is just about the commonest set of personal stakes a children's movie can adopt for itself. And make no mistake, A Bug's Life is a children's movie. Years of Pixar movies blurring the line between movies mostly for kids and families, versus movies that are kind of for adults but kids can enjoy them (and in the case of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, traipsing right over that line) have made it hard to remember that initially, they made no real claims to that kind of sophistication. And while I regret the implications of the word "unsophisticated" is exactly the adjective to describe A Bug's Life, from its paint-by-numbers character motivations to its easy and surprisingly lowbrow humor: there are more potty jokes here than in any other Pixar movie, though given how many of them contain no potty jokes at all, that's not a huge bar to clear.

All of that being the case, the film has the basic decency to be an extraordinarily good version of an undistinguished children's movie. The finished script, by Stanton and Don McEnery & Bob Shaw, is characterised by crisp dialogue and strong jokes, and the layers of callbacks and internal echoes give it a nice overall shape that strengthens Flik and Atta's arcs; the random asides that play on the reality that we're watching insects living like humans are generally cute rather than actively smart, but I cannot lie: I chuckled at things like a fly grousing "I've only got 24 hours to live and I'm not wasting them here" in '98 and I continue to do it in 2015. And the light humor is aided enormously by the cast, made up disproportionately of sitcom veterans (Richard Kind and Edie McClurg also show up), who thus have exactly the right skill set to make lines and scenarios that you can see coming from quite a distance still play with honesty and energy and feel like they're coming from the characters, not from the writing room.

And again, film looks pretty great, too. The filmmakers' fascination with a scaled-down world, what that means to lighting and texture, is the first great experiment in finding the realism in fantastic setting that makes Pixar's films the most physically authentic animated features in the world. Just the way that clover and blades of grass filter light is enough to make the film look truly marvelous and rich, and that's not even the most conspicuously beautiful lighting effect that the film has to offer. It's a bit baffling that this carefully researched and highly thoughtful attempt at making a realistic miniature world would be in service to such a weird misrepresentation of ant society. Even Antz, which is literally a movie about what would happen if Woody Allen was an ant, comes at least slightly closer to correctly representing how ants function, which for starters involves having six limbs and not coming in shades of blue and lavender. Not till Bee Movie nine years later would a film get insect society so palpably wrong as a basic condition of having a narrative.

But it is, in fairness, a cartoon riffing on the old "Grasshopper and the Ants" fable in a thoroughly unexpected way, so realism is probably the wrong complaint. And by creating a race of fantasy creatures that it calls ants for no reason, A Bug's Life (last nitpick: ants aren't bugs) succeeds in portraying simple situations with warm characters whose relationships, though they mostly come right off the shelf (the simple commoner charms the princess with his bravery? YOU DON'T SAY.), are treated with utter sincerity and a glancing touch. There's no question that this is near the bottom of Pixar's output, but it didn't know that it would be competing with those other films, and on its own terms, it's an entirely beguiling little adventure that advancing technology and a vastly different marketplace haven't robbed of its merits.

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FLOCKING WONDERFUL

I will likely never get over the grisly syntax of its title, but in all other ways, Shaun the Sheep Movie is a miraculous film. It is gripped by a gentleness in both tone and worldview that has been almost totally invisible in children's cinema in the English speaking world for years upon years - and this is, very much, a children's movie. There's no merit in claiming for it the merit of sophistication it does not possess; no complex metaphors for the structure and process of human consciousness here, nor filthy double entendres placed atop a rickety scaffold of self-aware pop culture references. It has the simplest (though this does not make them less rich or important or humane) of themes - do right by your friends, and clean up after your mistakes - and wordplay that anyone old enough to read words in English can understand.

It is also, by all means, enormously satisfying and pleasurable: the gentleness may be there to make a safe 85 minutes for little ones, but it makes a gratifying respite from the hectic large-scale nature of most animated features. Even when Shaun the Sheep Movie turns hectic - as it does during the de rigueur third act chase scene that represents the film's one indefensible commitment to the limited narrative imagination of mainstream animation - it remains breathtakingly little in its scope and in its miniaturised craftsmanship. We should expect no less of England's great Aardman Animations, a studio whose hand-crafted stop-motion animation has resulted in some of the most lovely, warm, and delectably tangible cartoons of modern cinema, and here returns to its roots: not since 2000's Chicken Run has one of Aardman's features so proudly foregrounded its clay-based construction and the dollhouse-like fineness of its sets, nor worn the smudgy fingerprints to appear in its character's bodies as such badges of honor.

Expanding from the Aardman TV series Shaun the Sheep, of which I have little firsthand knowledge, the movie starts at a sheep farm somewhere in the north of England, where the cleverest of all the sheep is a small fellow named Shaun (there's not a single line of recognisable speech in the movie, but Shaun's vocalisations are provided by Justin Fletcher). As we see in a sweet opening montage staged as old 8mm footage, Shaun and his flock were the pride and joy of a farmer (John Sparkes) when they were all much younger, but age and routine have gotten the best of everybody: the sheep, the farmer, the long-suffering sheepdog Bitzer (Sparkes also). And thus it is that Shaun decides, with the help of a serendipitous bus ad, that it's time for a day off. He and his fellows stage an elaborate trap to distract Bitzer and put the farmer to sleep with the ol' "counting sheep" trick, and prepare to goof off in a harmless way, but in so doing they manage to send a trailer with the farmer inside careening down a hill, all the way to The Big City down the road. Lost and alone and hungry, the sheep and Bitzer have no option other than to head to the city to find the farmer, in the process running afoul of the zealous animal control officer Trumper (Omid Djalili), who makes capturing Shaun his primary goal for the duration of however long it is that the animals hunt through downtown. The farmer, meanwhile, has received a nasty bump on the head and lost his memory, upon which his muscle memory of shearing sheep leads him down the path of becoming a great new celebrity barber.

That last point undoubtedly sounds like a bridge further past the bridge too far, but one of the joys of Shaun the Sheep Movie lies in its redemption of ideas that seem, on their face, to be just as awful as they could possibly be. For example, the film is eagerly full of crude jokes about bodily emissions of all sorts, the worst bane of contemporary family filmmaking if there can be only one, but these jokes are centered so carefully on the characters and the world they inhabit that they end up feeling... not clever, but certainly funnier than "he just farted!" humor has any rational right to be. Or a hoary, ancient gag about how it looks like someone is peeing in a fountain but it's actually something innocuous. This doesn't always happen: the soundtrack is ready and willing to launch into a pop music interlude at the drop of a hat, and while the original song "Feels Like Summer" is used well as an emotional tether throughout, most of the song breaks are jarring and only serve to break the delicate tone that the wordless animation works so hard to craft.

When that tone works, however, the film is an irresistible gem of sweetness and concision. The clay puppets that make up the cast are astoundingly expressive - with eight sheep to keep track of, the film not only gives them all sufficiently different designs all on the same basic model that we can readily tell them apart without ever wondering why none of them look like sheep. Better yet, they're all given specific personalities, all depicted solely through pantomime and facial expressions of deeply appealing flexibility and subtlety. I assume this is all held over from the series, and that it's long practice and familiarity with the characters that makes it work so terrifically - nor should we forget that this is the studio behind the timeless Gromit, maybe the most expressive and relatable of all nonspeaking characters in animation. Animals that act like humans without betraying their animal nature and have fully realised personalities are kind of what Aardman does best, and Shaun the Sheep Movie is a least in part a victory lap to show how they can sustain doing nothing else for nearly an hour and a half.

The characters, especially Shaun, the guileless lamb Timmy (Fletcher), and the new character of a hideous stray mutt named Slip (Tim Hands), give the film its heart and resonance, and they're also marvelous comic performers: while the humor is never less than predictable (it's hard to imagine it being anything else, given the target audience), this ends up being funnier than one would expect of something with the edges sanded off so vigorously. The timing that co-writers and -directors Richard Starzak & Mark Burton bring to bear is flawless: beats hold for just long enough, character reactions are just extreme enough, and once punchlines land the film moves by them without dawdling. But better even than the character-derived humor is the wit baked into the look of the film: as much as any Aardman film yet, as much as any animated film period, the world in which Shaun the Sheep Movie is crammed full of little grace notes that the film lingers on just long enough that you can tell it wants you to notice, and the staging at times invokes the visual punning of a Jacques Tati film.

It is a playful movie, all in all: drifting into an impromptu musical number during an early montage and a more steadily choreographed one later, building a satisfying nest of callbacks and repeated gags, giving all of its characters squashy, flexible ways of moving that complement their rounded designs. That plus the directness and emotional accessibility of it make it immensely pleasurable and reassuring cinema: a movie that's perfectly tailored for children but made with such command of its aesthetic and with such a sincere belief in what it's up to that not being a child is absolutely no obstacle to finding it a wholly rewarding experience.

8/10 (a galling rating, but its few flaws are glaring - taking out the poor song choices would get it up to a 9 without anything else changing. Don't be surprised if I retcon this when the year-end list happens)

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It's also pandering to '80s nostalgia, so let's go ahead and travel back to that decade

The dominant criticism of The Wizard when it was new in 1989 was that it was transparently a commercial for Nintendo, crudely fashioned into a simulacrum of a feature film, and the idea was this was somehow a filthy trick to play on the children in its target audience. Having been exactly the right age with exactly the right interests to care, I would like to promise those worried adults: we knew. The fact that it was a commercial was in fact exactly the draw - this was the movie which would offer North America its first opportunity to see footage from Super Mario Bros. 3, and it was advertised on precisely that basis. If you were Nintendo-playing grade schooler in '89, this was about on par with Christ returning to play Himself in a movie before inaugurating the end times. That being said, despite being the exact sort of person who this movie was made for, I never bothered seeing it - I mean, hell, it was a feature-length commercial.

A quarter of a century later,* The Wizard looks no less like a commercial, and its single-minded commitment to the style and attitude that children of the late 1980s perceived as cool leaves it feeling very much like a communication from some alien species. The last half-hour of the movie, in particular, is an incomprehensible frenzy of sound and noise and color that feel like a bad acid trip. Or perhaps a really, really good acid trip.

Not that you would know this at first, for among the film's many peculiarities is its earnest desire for almost its entire first hour to function as a mordant domestic drama. The opening image, underneath the credits, is a telephoto shot of nine-year-old Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) walking along a featureless desert road, arriving nowhere and doing it slowly. It's a dead ringer for something out of a '70s movie, and it's frankly rather presumptuous for an '80s kids film of any sort, let alone one that has every intention of trying to sell us video games. And this will very much continue on as the film sketches its rather bitter family scenario: Jimmy is the autistic son of the divorced Sam Woods (Beau Bridges) and Christine Bateman (Wendy Phillips), the latter of whom has since remarried a snappish control freak (Sam McMurray), and retained custody of Jimmy. Having finally concluded that he's too difficult for his and everyone else's own good, the Batemans have made the hard choice to put him in an institution. This makes Sam unhappy, but it really pisses off his second son, Corey (Fred Savage), from his first marriage, who decides to spring Jimmy from the institution and run away from home with him. The Batemans hire a sleazy bounty hunter, Putnam (Will Seltzer), to track the boys down, while Sam, anxious to keep Corey from their punitive hands (we are assured that Christine, in her days as Corey's stepmother, didn't even feign affection for the boy), takes his eldest son, Corey's full brother Nick (Christian Slater), on a trip with him to track the boys down.

So far, so good: a little over-plotted, and you need to pay a bit of attention to catch all of the nuances of how these people are related and what they think about each other, but if the world actually required a serious '70s style domestic drama about the ugly fallout from a divorce done up as an adventurous road movie for children - and I really do not suppose that it did - this is good enough to get the job done. But this is merely the overture; the warm-up, even. From here, thing start to get enormously weird, and they do it fast. Trying to buy a bus ticket, Corey and Jimmy encounter Haley (Jenny Lewis), a girl Corey's age who seems to be some kind of '30s Depression-comedy vagabond in the body of a 1989 13-year-old. It's astonishing. She throws out punny, cutting quips, delivered at a rapid-fire clip in a snarky tone that the young actor is visibly confused by herself; it's like director Todd Holland took her aside on the first day of shooting to demand that she play her character as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and refused thereafter to listen to any of her questions as to what the hell that meant.

As the quick-witted dame with a con artist's soul, it's Haley who figures out how to monetise Jimmy's newly discovered skill at video games, by betting against businessmen and tough skaterboarders and the like. It's at this point that it's impossible to stop noticing that The Wizard is no less than Rain Man with children, and thus at this point The Wizard turns into a mostly surreal experience. Not totally surreal; we still have to get to the final act for that. Before that happens, our plucky trio has to cross paths with Lucas (Jackey Vinson), the ballingest video game hot shot in the Southwest, who introduces them to the holiness that is the Nintendo Power Glove, and after quietly slipping around in the background, with a little music from Super Mario Bros. 2 here, or a little flash of the NES controller there, the movie explodes into its truest self, as a shameless plug for buying things from Nintendo, playing Nintendo, idealising Nintendo as the pinnacle achievement of human technology and society. For the Power Glove. One of the most notoriously awful video game peripherals ever built. "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad" the boy says with the self-satisfaction of a dreadful yuppie from the era's sex comedies, and it at least half of that is the truest statement in this entire movie.

The shameless wallowing in Nintendo prowess and ownership as the keenest of all social dominance markers, plus Holland and screenwriter David Chisholm's constant inability to treat this kids' movie like a kids movie, forcing the poor child actors into positions of pantomiming adult behavior in their conversations about video games, or sometimes accusing innocent bystanders of being pedophiles ("He! Touched! My! Breast!"), plus the dazzlingly dated costumes and hairstyles, are all enough to make this an extravagantly weird viewing experience, now that we're a generation past its sell-by date. But we're still not to the part where the movie goes off a cliff. That happens at Universal Studios Hollywood, where Video Armageddon, the nation's premier Nintendo gaming competition, is held. For starters, the set of Video Armageddon looks like a combination of the boiler room on an aircraft carrier and an athletic shoe store. Second, the event's announcer (Steven Grives) declaims lines in a manner not compatible with any dialect of English, dancing about and grinning manically like he is the actual Satan and this is some particularly tacky corner of Hell. Third, there's not even a cursory relationship between the proclamations of gameplay and points scored announced over the loudspeaker, and what we can actually see with our own damn eyes.

In short, what is most mystifying about The Wizard isn't that it's a movie set up as a feature-length ad for video games despite being welded onto an emotionally lacerating domestic drama: it's that it's an ad for video games that makes video games look like a peyote hallucination, throwing fragments of game imagery up on screen in ways that make the games themselves seem like jagged, incomprehensible masses of arbitrary movement and the players all puppets in the grip of some helpless madness. It makes videogaming look like the most unpleasant, frenzied activity on Earth, better suited to punishment than entertainment

It's shockingly bad, and coupled with the enormous tonal shifts that happen throughout the movie, it feels basically like The Wizard has an aneurysm right as we're watching it. This is an appallingly jagged and messy film, ugly to look at and saddled with narrative developments that simply happen because the film knows that its end point has to be a video game competition. Everything within it is incongruous to everything else. For those who grew up in the video game culture it depicts, I think it probably serves as a fascinating enough snapshot to serve as a kind of hell-dimension nostalgia trip; but for everyone, its completely batshit insane concept of what human beings are like and what kind of physical spaces the inhabit makes it a thoroughly mesmerising So Bad It's Good spectacular.

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SIDEKICKS: THE MOVIE

Bad movies are one thing. We know how to deal with them. But Minions isn't bad, exactly. It's perfectly neutral - the most impressively flavorless movie in many a long age. I've found preparing to review it has been something of an exciting race against the clock: would I be able to finish writing before every last memory I had of the experience of watching it had evaporated away? Given how hard it was to remember the beginning of the movie by the end of it, dear reader, I was not optimistic.

The film is a point-missing prequel to 2010's Despicable Me and 2013's Despicable Me 2 that contradicts the back-story heavily implied by the first of those movies, on top of the greater sin of fundamentally messing up the tonal balance that drove both of them. Basically, this is what happens when you put the comic sidekicks in the driver's seat. Instead of the little yellow capsule-shaped, gibberish-spouting minions serving as a enjoyably wacky, old-school cartoon way of leavening the slightly more sincere A-plot (as in DM1), or threatening to overwhelm the A-plot entirely and sort of making the whole thing a bit of a screechy annoyance (as in DM2), here they're the whole show. It's exactly like the difference between having a few cookies in between bites of a not-very-healthy mill, versus just straight-up unlocking your jaw an pouring a whole fucking bag of sugar down your throat, right down to the jitteriness and the headache at the end of it.

Minions opens at the dawn of life on Earth, with one of its very best sequences: the minions evolving from yellow unicellular organisisms clinging with enthusiasm to a bigger, meaner unicellular organism, and so on through the early history of evolution. It's in a style that looks like chalk drawings, skipping through time in a series of fluid "in-camera" edits, a great piece of mixed-media playfulness that of course descends into standard-issue CGI the second that the opening credits stop, and Geoffrey Rush pipes up on the soundtrack to narrate how minions evolved to pursue and serve the cruelest villain alive at any moment in history, eventually finding their true calling when mankind came into existence. And I will say this: to hell with narration (and the sequence would definitely play better if it were told entirely through images and editing), but there's absolutely no better choice than Rush for the slightly acidic warmth that gives the narration a sense of stately authority while also indulging the rampant silliness of the humor.

Anyway, the film posits that after accidentally killing Napoleon, the minions fled to the arctic to build their own society, and eventually found themselves on the verge of death by boredom, without any bad guys to serve. So in 1968, one of the wisest of them all, Kevin (voiced, like all the minions, by co-director Pierre Coffin), decides to go on a mission to find a boss, accompanied by the childlike moron Bob and the snotty Stuart - and before I completely get out of the habit of complimenting the film, kudos to writer Brian Lynch, to directors Coffin and Kyle Balda, and all the animators for creating three totally distinct personalities, instantly readable and flawlessly distinctive despite the fact that all three are identically-dressed yellow tubes with googly eyes.

The three minions arrive in New York, and travel thence to Orlando, amusingly sketched out as a pre-Disney hell of swampland and barely visible roads, and here they attend Villain Con. A spot of good luck puts them in touch with Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), the world's first female supervillain, who takes them on as her henchmen for a plot to steal the crown jewels of England. And somewhere in all of that, Minions burns off all the charm of its characters, and its brightly colored, highly angular design, and the way that design fits neatly into the stylistic ethos of the 1960s, and pretty much every other damn thing that gives it an ounce of personality. In essence, the film has no momentum of any sort: scenes happen, we hear one of the many incongruous celebrity voices studded into the movie (Steve Coogan, Allison Janney, a totally wasted Michael Keaton), some gags modeled on the slapstick MGM animation of the '40s or the absurdist Warner animation of the '50s. Then the cycle restarts. At no point does a sense of inevitability take over; there's barely even a sense of continuity about things, especially in the astonishingly arbitrary middle section when the minions wander around trying to find the crown and then- but even a barely-plotted collection of wacky shorts tied together more by proximity than anything else deserves better than to be spoiled, I guess.

The most annoying thing about Minions is that it has just enough individual pieces that are terrific in isolation that it's really not possible to discard the whole. The opening credits are on obvious place where the animation takes such a swerve that I can't help but love it, and the same is true of a mid-film bedtime story in faux-claymation with appealingly goofy character design and an acerbic, abrupt sense of humor. There are moments in which the even the bog-standard CG animation is suddenly and powerfully beautiful and detailed in texture and lighting.

And there are comic highlights throughout, one or two minutes of a stretch where the ludicrous illogic of the storytelling turns into something close enough to the classic cartoon shorts that are plainly never far from the filmmakers' minds that you can see them if you squint. The same lack of cohesion or building momentum that makes the overall movie a slog is, in fact, something of a strength at the micro level: the villain convention, for example, is such an odd and off-putting narrative element, but it's responsible for some of the most effective dashes of zany jokes in the whole movie.

But I'm hunting for nice things to say towards a movie about which it's hard to feel anything at all. Uncharitably, I'd say that Minions is a film that expects its viewer to have a stunted attention span. It jumps around so much in search of loud, simple gags that you never have to worry about paying attention. Were I being kind, I'd say that it simply knows its target audience: little kids who want to be dazzled for 90 minutes while laughing at straightforward jokes. Still and all, "it does a good job pandering to children" is hardly the stuff of praise and even if I aged out of the right mindset to really meet the film where it lives a solid quarter-century ago, I like to think that I still know profoundly mediocre filmmaking when I see it.

5/10

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NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict is "there's a ticking clock and we have to get back before it runs out", or basically the third act that's always the most uninteresting part of Pixar movies stretched out to the full length of the 94-minute film

Regardless, it's Pixar's most effective and most moving feature since the six-year-old Up, and while I think the "Pixar's best!" chatter that you can find here and there is premature, it's very easy to see why somebody would want to promote that opinion. Surely, it's the most ambitious film in the studio's history: it's a feature-length metaphor, after all, which isn't something for the squeamish. Specifically, it's a metaphor about the processes of human memory and emotions in a time of extreme stress both environmental (moving to a new city) and biological (doing so at the very earliest years of adolescence), setting up shop in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and literalising the concepts of cognitive theory as physical spaces for the adventures had by her five core emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Who are also literalised, as color-coded humanoids made out of quantum particles that you can just barely see in close-ups as a mottled, almost fuzzy surface of tiny floating spheres.

The actual "what really happened" plot is that Riley has just moved from Minnesota, where she loves her friends and adores playing hockey, to an old rundown building in San Francisco. Picking up on the extreme frustration and stress felt by her father (Kyle MacLachlan), whose business - the reason they moved in the first place - is hitting a potentially fatal snag, and her mother (Diane Lane), helplessly trying to track down their missing moving truck and clearly none too happy about being uprooted herself, Riley tries to force herself to be the same happy-go-lucky child her parents have always praised her for being, but this quickly curdles into a perpetual state of peevishness marked by bursts of terror, and eventually she decides to run away back to Minnesota. And as she does so, she slides into a depressive state where she can barely feel anything at all.

But ah! the way that Inside Out chooses to tell that story is gorgeous and complicated and crazily imaginative: inside the control room of Riley's mind, which has been the domain of the upbeat, bullying Joy for all of recorded history, an accident has sent her and Sadness spiraling into the recesses of Riley's memories, leaving the ill-equipped Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness journey through Riley's headspace, finding her subconscious, her imagination, and the chasm where all of her lost memories are dumped, never to be retrieved again, escorted by the cotton candy-cat-elephant-dolphin hybrid Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley's mostly-forgotten imaginary friend. The film presents all of the mercurial and abrupt shifts of personality that accompany being 11 and thrust into a new life as the results of the emotions' desperate attempts to find a solution to their predicament, with everybody (and especially Joy) anxious to get back to the unmixed state when Joy wouldn't let anybody else call the shots. Though with Sadness's shocking, newfound ability to alter the nature of Riley's memories just by touching them, it's clear to us long before the emotions are willing to admit it that Riley's days of unmixed joy are behind her.

The idea that our thoughts and feelings are sentient creatures bumbling around in our heads isn't new, of course: the earliest cinematic version I can name is the 1943 Disney WWII propaganda cartoon Reason and Emotion, and the image of the mind as a person sitting in the body directing it is an ancient one. But Inside Out is as perfect a filmed depiction of that hook as has ever been made, coming up with an expansive, highly creative world of intricately worked-out rules to explore the concepts of cognitive psychology in a simplified, even fabulistic way. It does an extraordinarily good job of establishing its world one piece at a time, so we grasp the basic vocabulary intuitively enough that when the movie starts to use that vocabulary in complicated ways later on, we don't need to have it explained what's going on. Knowing that colors map onto emotions, we can grasp the enormous difference between a day that has produced mostly yellow (Joy) memories and a day that has produced a slurry of green, red, and purple (Disgust, Anger, Fear) memories at a visceral level, both because the colors themselves are unpleasant and toxic all mixed together, but because the film trained us why that's upsetting without having openly told us it was doing so.

Cognitive modeling and inventive visual storytelling aside, Inside Out is simply a great amount of fun to watch. The actors are exemplary: the five core emotions are all obvious but phenomenally on-point casting decisions, especially in the subtle details, like how Poehler isn't just perfect for Joy, but perfect for a specifically bossy, arrogant Joy. And with that handled, the film has already done a huge part of its work, making the emotions appropriately broad, bold personalities to go with the film's searing bright colors and Seussian designs of the spaces inside Riley's head. With those personalities in place, the film can go about the business of mixing them around and working not just as a fun story of two mismatched characters on a journey, but, increasingly, as a deeply effective study of emotions jockeying for prominence, and learning the hard truth that feeling sad isn't always inappropriate and should be embraced when it's the right time for it. Which is a lesson that's not just bold for a nominal children's movie (though not since Ratatouille has Pixar made a movie that strikes me as more geared towards adults), but bold for anything made in American cinema. It's one of the ways that Inside Out feels like Pixar's very own Studio Ghibli film, more emotionally sophisticated and trusting of its audience than even the very best of what we'd normally expect from corporate family filmmaking.

It's also one of the ways that Inside Out is clearly the third film to be directed by Pete Docter, whose two previous films - Monsters, Inc. and Up - already marked him out as the feelingest of Pixar's director stable. His balance of goofy comedy and dumbfounding heartbreak is excellent here, as it would almost have to be; I'll confess that I was promised more robust, devastating tears than I got (the opening montage and scrapbook scenes in Up are both harder-hitting to my mind, as is the incomparable finale of Toy Story 3), but none of Inside Out's feints toward tear-jerking, nor its dumbest, most stereotyped jokes feel at all unearned or unconsidered. It tries to cover the whole range of feelings and it largely gets there.

It has a few rough patches, undoubtedly. Docter and his co-writers never came up with a really interesting idea for Disgust, who feels by far the least consequential of the core emotions, and outside of it main themes, Michael Giacchino's score is disappointingly rote, given that some of his career-best work has happened in Pixar films. And there are other nitpicks and niggles her and there. But the grandness of the film's ambitions and its ingenuity in realising those amibitions, its sheer cleverness and sophistication as a most unique kind of character study, these things eradicate any nitpicks and render niggles the nastiest kind of pettiness. This is at most only a hair shy of top-tier Pixar, and not just the kind of aesthetically adventurous storytelling that all animation should aspire to, it's what all of mainstream American cinema should want to be - funny and meaningfully sad, deeply thoughtful about its world and story.

9/10

(A hedge; I'm not quite willing to commit to 10 yet, though "yet" is the key word there. I can easily imagine liking this more with subsequent viewings, and I cannot conceive of liking it any less)

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SHINING AT THE END OF EVERY DAY

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof's presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film's director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that's far from an objective truth, even though it's obviously the worst of his five features. But more to the point, there's no separating Bird from Tomorrowland: it might share the name with a large segment of the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom theme parks and thus be part of the Disney corporation's endless game of "brand extension", and it might be a phenomenally overpriced summer tentpole, but this is no director-for-hire job; this is absolutely a movie made by the director of The Iron Giant, and much of what some people find annoying about it thematically derives directly from that fact. What people find annoying about the story structure is vintage Lindelof. I'll spot that part of it, not least because I absolutely agree with it.

That structure gets off to an inordinately rocky start, with one of the most damaging and irritating framework narratives I've seen in a long time. Damaging, because when it returns at the end of the movie, it sets up an implied relationship to those of us in the audience that Bird and Lindelof couldn't possibly have actually intended. Irritating, because it feels like a filmed improv exercise circling around the drain for endless agonising minutes, as two characters we'll eventually learn to be Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) bicker mindlessly about the right way to tell the story and the right place to start (and, incidentally, Frank's attitude in this scene also feels profoundly miscalculated given where it ends up arriving in the film's overall chronology). Eventually, they get out of this rut to open on the story of young Frank's (Thomas Robinson) experiences at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, where he introduced a semi-working jetpack to a glum fellow we'll later know as Nix (Hugh Laurie), and is invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a girl about Frank's age, and despite her youth apparently an adviser to Nix. She's the one who gives Frank a pin that allows him access to a teleporter that takes him to a fantastical world of high technology, and then we trot ahead to 2015, our appetites having been presumably whetted.

Whetted, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and Tomorrowland makes the strategically baffling decision to simultaneously align itself at an audience of children and their families, while also basing virtually all of its appeal on nostalgia for the Space Age - something that not merely the children, but even their parents are largely too young to possesses, except secondhand. And this is the element of the film that directly recalls The Iron Giant: the wholehearted belief that things were better when there was more optimism about the future and less terror, and the promise of space exploration made everything seem bright, shiny, and futuristic. This sits comfortably right next to the film's thesis that the biggest problem with contemporary life is that we've gotten tremendously good at identifying everything rotten, and then putting exactly no effort into fixing it. Which I think is entirely true, though the movie's somewhat pie-eyed idea for solving this human shortcoming largely through the power of wishing and reminding everybody how much we all used to want jet-packs is not entirely true. Maybe not even mostly true.

So the movie is in 2015, where we find Casey, a high schooler who has been instilled with the very same belief in choosing optimism over fatalism by her dad (Tim McGraw), a NASA engineer. Casey's gung-ho attitude is so pronounced, it brings her to the attention of Athena, who hasn't aged an hour since 1964, and who gives the older? younger? girl a pin that, when touched, transports her into a strange high-tech world full of, wouldn't you know, jet-packs and such other chrome-coated signs of mid-century futurism. And her tour of this world, once she figures out how to use the pin safely (when in Tomorrowland, for that is this place, she still interacts physically with the real world), is the film's outright highlight, a synthetic long take that moves through one of the most impressive CGI landscapes ever put into a movie, craning around to catch every last detail. It is the perfect cinematic mechanism to put us in the exact same place of dumbfounded awe and childlike excitement that Casey feels, and if that was the solitary triumph of Bird and cinematographer Claudio Miranda's work on this project, I wouldn't be able to reject the film outright.

It triggers a quest, and that's exactly where Tomorrowland collapses. It's not worth going into all of the movie's odds and ends as Casey and Athena hunt down angry grown-up Frank, and Casey learns the secret of Tomorrowland, a place where all of the most gifted geniuses of the 20th Century gathered to make the world a better, kinder place, until cynicism and hopelessness caused them to lock it away and watch it decay into a husk of its former self (it's an unambiguous though maybe unintentional parody and subversion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the best and brightest hiding in a gulch, only here the geniuses are presented as moral failures because they refuse to freely share their knowledge and achievements with all of humanity. This has not prevented the film from being used as further evidence of Bird's crypto-Randianism by people with nothing more interesting to do with their lives than willfully misunderstand movies). The biggest flaw of the movie, in fact, is the fascination it has with those odds and ends, and the greedy way it dolls them out, piecemeal. It's the whole "mystery box" shtick that was pioneered by J.J. Abrams, mentor in different ways to both Lindelof and Bird, and it doesn't work in Tomorrowland at all.

The film is a punishing 130 minutes, and most of that is taken up with the endless second act, in which Casey drives from Florida to Texas to New York all while failing to learn things that could speed the film up considerably. That's not fair, actually. I mean, it absolutely is fair - the movie would be cleaner, faster, and more engaging if Athena and Frank would just fucking tell Casey what she eventually finds out. And we'd have a sense of the conflict sooner than 90 minutes into the movie, which would be nice, in this children's film from Disney. But it's not fair because the film also suffers from unneeded bloat: there's a trip to Paris that could be written out of the script with the barest amount of work, and several other moments that could be snugged up and shortened. The film could fly and get to the collapsing Tomorrowland well before the one-hour mark; instead it creeps and drags, with the heftiness of an epic but the simplicity of message movie for kids and parents to share. It's a terrible combination of flavors, and it makes a solid 40 minutes of the film seem to exist for no reason other than to keep the good parts as far separate as the filmmakers dared.

It's a pity that the script is so puffy, because a lot of Tomorrowland is really quite lovely: the design is terrific, Bird's adoration of mid-century science fiction is so palpable that it almost veers into self-parody (at one point, it does just that: there's a trip to a curiosity shop selling geek-friendly trinkets that's very little more than a delivery system for in-jokes), and the ingenuity of some of the setpieces both at the level of conception and visual execution is fun and playful. Clooney plays a snappish old man well enough, and Robertson and Cassidy are two absolutely indispensable discoveries - neither of them a "discovery" per se (it's not even Robertson's first leading role - she was in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride earlier in 2015. Though I imagine that Tomorrowland probably shot first), but given exemplary showcase roles her that make a strong argument for how much we should all want to follow both actors in the future.

All of the ingredients of the film are there, and many parts of it are beguiling summer movie candy; it's just not a great story. The beginning I liked, even for all its saccharine sentiment; the end I liked, even for its contrivance and one hellaciously stretched-out death scene. The middle, though, is nothing but an endurance test. I'm not even sure that the middle is what there's the most of it, but God knows it feels that way, and that's exactly the problem.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY THEME PARKS AT THE MOVIES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Disney's latest effort in brand-mining, Tomorrowland, takes the name (if nothing else) from one of the most famous attractions at Disney's various theme parks. Journey with me back to the beginning of this particular game.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset.

-H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The Country Bears goes wrong fast, and it goes wrong hard. The film's opening scene is a concert in 1991, the final one given by the titular group before their inglorious retirement, and every last thing about it conspires to be as hideous in combination as remotely possible - the lighting is perfectly designed to accentuate everything that looks horrible about the main characters. For the main characters are people in extraordinarily complex bear costumes with state-of-the-art puppetry faces. And the first time we see them, they look like there was no room left in Hell, and so it began to vomit forth the dead.

Setting aside the ursine abominations inhabiting all the main roles - though we cannot help but return to them later - The Country Bears is a disgusting moral failure of a different sort. This is, depending on the exact set of definitions you want to use,* the very first movie released by the Walt Disney Company as a tie-in promotion to one of its theme park attractions. This was back in 2002, when the company's film division was starting to lose its way again after roaring back to life in the early 1990s, and any terrible idea that could plausibly be defended as a branding exercise could make it through the gates. 50 weeks and two movies later, this misbegotten experiment would finally result in a critical and commercial success, with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; but before that happened Disney had to embarrass itself a couple of times (The Haunted Mansion was the second effort; I haven't seen it, but the rumor is that it's the worst of the trio).

Really, though, calling The Country Bears an embarrassment is being nice (and also a shameful waste of a pun: it's a veritable embearassment!!!!!). This a stare into the black void of corporate shamelessness and inartistic savagery, a movie whose technologically audacious and unforgivably off-putting animatronic bears are merely the most visible example of the movie's overriding lack of anything beautiful or interesting. The story the producers settled on - Mark Perez is the credited writer and Peter Hastings directed (an animation story artist making his solitary theatrical film), but it hardly seems fair to blame them for getting their names slathered on what's unambiguously a company affair first and foremost - is as musty as it gets, trading on the sadly too-common belief that if you're making a movie for kids, you can get away with any number of clichés, since your pre-teen target audience hasn't encountered them yet. Herein, Beary Barrington (voiced by Haley Joel Osment, sung by Elizabeth Daily, physically performed by Misty Rosas and Alice Dinnean - this is going to turn into an all-parenthetical review if I keep up like this, so let's just acknowledge that the bears were all played by puppeteers working their asses off), a tween bear adopted by humans, has started to feel the pain of being different, goaded by his dick adopted brother Dex (Eli Marienthal). So he runs away to make a pilgrimage to Country Bear Hall, the home of his beloved Country Bears before they disbanded eleven years ago. I allowed myself to assume from the dates that it might turn out that one of the Bears would prove to have fathered Beary, because I somehow managed to expect that this would at least invest itself in some fancier dumb clichés.

Country Bear Hall is, alas, about to be torn down by the over-enthusiastic (human) developer Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken, in the role that exemplifies the "can't say no to a paying job" aspect of his career). But Beary has a great idea: if the Bears get back together for a benefit concert, surely the hall's owner and the band's manager, Henry Dixon Taylor (Kevin Michael Richardson) could raise the $20,000 to save the historic site. So the two of them go on a road trip to recruit the divided bears: brothers Ted and Fred Bedderhead (Diedrich Bader and Brad Garrett), Zeb Zoober (Stephen Root), Tennessee O'Neal (Toby Huss), and Trixie St. Claire (Candy Ford). Given that all of them are suffering som kind of enormous dysfunction and bad blood lies between many of them individually, this proves to be most difficult task. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't prove insurmountable, because this is a Disney picture.

The absurdly insipid, pedestrian storytelling could never have resulted in a movie worth keeping, though it's honestly the strongest thing about The Country Bears; hoary, trite stereotypes at least have the benefit of being road-tested. Even without leaving the writing, the characters are a much bigger liability, being as they are a collection of cheap redneck jokes weirdly sanitised for the sake of the kids who make up the sole audience that can be honestly supposed to enjoy this. The actors are totally helpless to combat this problem, owing in no small part to the tripartite acting (voice, body, face). Frequently throughout, and especially in the critical case of Beary, there's no obvious relationship between the physical performance and the line readings, and it makes the characters feel like emotionless monsters, even without accounting for the terrifying design and execution of the bear suits. They do not provide any illusion that they're connected to the story at all, simply floating through the world without interacting with it except arrhythmically, in the fashion of an alien being clumsily mimicking human behavior.

But let's go ahead and account for the bear costumes, anyway. They are marvels, produced by the Jim Henson Creature Shop and clearly serving to show off that company's best and brightest doing some of the most complex work imaginable. The bears have incredibly precise, flexible, nuanced faces; it's always possible to tell exactly what they're thinking just from a still image. But even so, they are pure, high octane nightmare fuel, the spiritual heirs to the four-year-old talking and walking snowman that the Creature Shop built for Jack Frost. The bears aren't quite as viscerally unacceptable as that character - bears, after all, exist in the world, and even at their most grotesquely malformed, none of them have any feature as individually upsetting as Jack Frost's arms. But dear God, I do not like to look at them. Their heads are all weirdly big for their bodies, and they look not quite like bears, even less than the original audio-animatronic creatures in the Disney attraction. Incidentally, I won't have a better moment to compare the movie to the show; as a Disney parks lifer, The Country Bears strikes me as a most generic and soulless attempt to spin off the Country Bear Jamboree (it's not clear at all from the script, but I think we're meant to understand the movie as a kind of sequel to the show; though it is a sequel from an alternate universe). The big problem is the music: the show has a soundtrack made up of goofy bluegrass music on the '50s model, the movie is larded up with that godawful country rock that started to become popular in the late 1990s, taking the folksy heart out of the whole genre of music. Another problem is ineptness: giving fan favorite Big Al (James Gammon) a slot in the film, and denying him his fan-favorite song? Shoddy multi-platform synergy, that. And for Christ's sake, not including the talking mounted game heads in any capacity is just proving that you didn't wanted to make a movie from this material in the first place.

I had not finished my low-grade freakout over the bear designs, though; hadn't even gotten to the worst part. Which is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their tremendously detailed, realistic mouths, with their incredibly specific teeth and almost tangibly damp tongues. And somehow, Hastings always seems to make them the centerpoint of every close-up. David Cronenberg couldn't have put more unsettling organic terrors into a movie if his life depended on it.

The film was a disaster at the box office, proving that sometimes we do live in a just universe. I feel sorry for the Creature Shop folks, honestly: the bears are miraculous machines, ugly or not. But they had the misfortune to show up in a badly-written and cloddishly-directed exercise in corporate intra-marketing. This is a commercial, and it's a remarkably bad one; and with Beary proving to be such an awful protagonist, alienating in every way, it's even worse as an inspirational tale of believing in your dreams and sticking by family, in various more or less figurative senses of that word. I would say that, if there were justice, this would have brutally murdered Disney's attempt to make movies out of theme park rides, but then, the first Pirates is at least worth the indignity of The Country Bears. And, indeed, the first Pirates - hell, all four Pirateses - seems that much more precious in light of how utterly craven and artistically uninspired its peculiar subgenre can so depressingly prove to be.

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THE CURIOUS LITTLE MONKEY

A review requested by Kari Johnson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

You have to hold it just right, but Curious George is sort of the exact moment that traditional animation died in the American studio system. There have been only four theatrically-released studio features animated in a traditional aesthetic style since Universal dropped the movie indifferently into the world in February, 2006, and every one of them comes with an asterisk: 2009's The Princess and the Frog and 2011's Winnie the Pooh were both essentially boutique products made by Disney, a company that openly tries to dictate rather than follow market realities;The Simpsons Movie in 2007 was, well, The Simpsons Movie, and beholden to an entirely unique audience; 2015's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, though primarily traditional animation, was heavily marketed to seem like a mostly CGI/live-action production. None of these four films entered the marketplace in anything like the same way Curious George did, in the wholly guileless belief that there was still an audience for traditional animation, albeit an audience of the extremely young and their parents. For its optimism, the film managed to not humiliate itself at the box office, and not a whole lot more.

Now, the danger in putting a movie like this in front of a classic American animation junkie like me is that Curious George much too easily invites "they used to it so much better! why do we live in such ghastly & depraved times! &c." rhetoric that does nobody any good. But there's little point in pretending that it's not exactly what it is: a movie that exists completely at odds to everything in the mainstream of family entertainment as it was practiced in the mid-'00s, which is much the same as it's practiced now, only with slightly less pop culture riffing. A mere two years after Shrek 2 landed on the animation marketplace like a bomb, this wasn't merely a throwback, it was something like an act of war, if a movie with such a profoundly gentle attitude can reasonably described as "warlike". The steady, pleasant story by Ken Kaufman and Mike Werb, adapting the iconic children's books by husband-and-wife illustrator-authors H.A. and Margret Rey nods its head to the greater world of animation storytelling as it existed at that point in time only in that it involves a kind of stupidly convoluted backstory to drive the action, involving concepts that feel a bit more elevated than the film's apparent target audience is likely to cotton to (will the old natural history museum turn into a parking garage, or can the heroes come up with a new exhibit to draw in big crowds in time?). But it has an almost Miyazakian calmness in keeping its stakes down to a nice slow boil, even going so far as to turn its antagonist into a sad, pitiable figure before the halfway mark.

It's an origin story, in which museum employee Ted (Will Ferrell) enthusiastically pitches himself into the mission of finding the lost shrine of Zagawa, home to an enormous ruby statue of an ape, in order to keep the Bloomsberry Museum solvent. For otherwise, the kind science nut Mr. Bloomsberry (Dick Van Dyke, in the first and far sweeter of his 2006 museum-related roles - Night at the Museum hulks in the future like a nascent canker sore) will be helpless to prevent his resentful son (David Cross, whose character has been designed to look unnervingly like him) from tearing the place down. Bloomsberry fils is able to sabotage Ted's trip enough that the explorer only finds a three-inch statue that guides the way to the actual shrine, but he also stumbles across a deeply inquisitive monkey (vocalised by the inimitable Frank Welker), who sneaks along back to the boat behind this strange lanky man all in yellow (Ted was tricked into buying surplus yellow khaki hiking clothes, to bring him in line as the Man with the Yellow Hat, the nameless character's designation in the books). Ted is at first anguished by how badly the monkey, eventually named George by the enthusiastic children under the care of the kind schoolteacher Maggie (Drew Barrymore), messes up his life, but the instant that he finally packs the simian off with animal control, he realises how much more enjoyable things were with that tiny bit of chaos. As one will. Also, the museum is razed and Mr. Bloomsberry is sent to a nursing home, babbling and senescent. Of course not! Unpredictable plotting is so low on Curious George's list of priorities that there's not even a number for it.

It takes a lot to sand the edges off of profoundly harmless source material, but Curious George does manage to be even less threatening than the books ever were; George has been changed from a playfully naughty little scamp to en embodiment of pure, untroubled innocence, so guileless that his rule-breaking only ever manages to charm his victims. Ted has dropped from being a stable adult presence to just a big kid, hideously shy around an very cute, obviously interested girl, and easily bruised by setbacks. It is a very soft movie, Curious George is, which turns out to be greatly appealing in the execution; there is not a trace of mania even when it takes its Pixarian turn into a chase, of sorts, around a city. The jokes are a bit dry and ironic, but never very difficult, and never too funny, in the sense that it expects a boisterous reaction. Director Matthew O'Callaghan is certain looking to amuse his audience, but not to whip us up; Curious George is as soothing as a fleece blanket and cup of tea on a rainy day.

I say that entirely from an adult's perspective: for all I know, actual children out in the world would find this maddeningly slow and low-impact, and that's part of why it has almost completely disappeared from any kind of cultural dialogue in less than a decade - hell, less than a couple of years. But it can be nice to watching something that pursues quiet and simplicity as a distinctive choice and not just a fallback from laziness - this is an immensely well-crafted movie, especially as a piece of animation, including use of color and and light that absolutely shame Disney's traditional animation death rattle from the handful of years preceding. Not, I hasten to point out, the actual character animation; the humans in the film are so simple that they start to lose definition. Nor in the effects, which are satisfactory without being terribly far-reaching or complicated (there are aerial shots of the crowded city that look several years behind the technological curve). But it's a beautiful movie in pastel and primary tones, with everything feeling covered by an almost indecipherable layer of fuzz. This, for example, is the ending position of the film's opening shot, and our first good look at the protagonist:

As opening mission statements go, that's a pretty clear one: you are about to embark on a movie that goes just a lightly diffuse as it hits your eyes, where nothing is indistinct, but even less so is anything particularly sharp. Also, the main character is boundlessly happy, like, always.

The results aren't perfect; owing mainly to a George-less first act (after an opening scene that functions as a prologue) that takes too much time being goofy and shrill about setting up the plot and human characters, all of whom are some kind of stereotype, but only sometimes obvious or reductive ones. The fate of a museum is a fine plot hook, but it didn't need to be set up in such detail, or with so much concern over Ted's whole deal. And the voices don't, in general, fit the faces - Ferrell disappears into his part, but Van Dyke, Barrymore, and Eugene Levy all significantly do not, and the presence of their characters tends to upset the movie's low key energy.

And really, the storytelling throughout is kind of strained: the movie constantly pulls itself between the states of "this is sweet and gentle and just about being in the moment" and "look at the gimcracks and silliness!", and the more it forgets about that damn parking garage, and the more it just watches Ted and George interacting, the more rewarding it is. So overall it's a touch lumpy, unsure of how patient it can honestly expect its audience to be; but it absolutely never panders, and it's lovely to look at for literally every frame of its running time, even with the "eh" level of the CG elements. I'm not sure if it deserves to be the childhood classic that it surely never shall become, but it's nice to have something this sincere and comforting out in the world, to be enjoyed by whatever small and self-selecting audience has the good fortune to stumble across it.

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AND THEY CALL IT PUPPY LOVE

A review requested by Max, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The hook of 2005's Little Manhattan is, to begin with, absolutely baffling, though if you just glance at it really quickly it might seem to make a kind of intuitive sense: hey, what if we did a romantic comedy, but, like, with preteens? I'd say that Little Manhattan ends up being much closer to the best possible outcome of that pitch, but to be honest, I don't even know what that would mean. But anyway, it's definitely not the worst case scenario. We can take comfort in that.

And as baffled as I am by that hook, it's not even the most baffling thing about the film, which is that it stars a pre-pubescent Josh Hutcherson, and he looked exactly the same as he does a decade later. It would be overselling it to call this "terrifying", but it's a little bit creepy at the very least.

In the film, Hutcherson plays Woody Allen. Now, that's a bit inapt, of course; the whole deal is that this is about 11-year-olds, and Allen started life as a middle-aged man eager to become bitterly old as quickly as possible. And "Hutcherson" isn't one of the more Judaical names, exactly. But filter out those things, and Woody Allen is exactly what we have left: an incredibly neurotic male with an inability to fathom the workings of the female brain that borders on the clinically dysfunctional, and a pipeline directly to the audience in the form of wall-to-wall narration. And it all takes place in New York, but the kind of "in New York" that almost exclusively means "the Upper West Side is the center of all meaningful human civilization, but occasionally we'll drift farther south in Manhattan if we absolutely must".

So Hutcherson actually plays Gabe, 10.75 years old, and the child of a marriage that has gone to a deeply foul place, but due to a weird quirk in divorce laws that, if I were an untrusting man, I'd suggest might have been pulled straight from screenwriter Jennifer Flackett's ass, his dad (Bradley Whitford) has to stay in the same apartment as his mom (Cynthia Nixon) until the divorce is final. So that's the a pretty toxic environment for a child entering the age when girls go from being disgusting Others to fascinating, enticing Others (and female screenwriter notwithstanding, Little Manhattan takes a strictly boy-oriented view of preadolescent courtship). And yet, things will happen as they must, and when Gabe manages to guilt his dad into signing off on karate lessons, the sparring partner he's matched with is Rosemary Telesco (Charlie Ray), once a friend of his and now simply part of the amorphous mass of The Girls At School that he and his exclusively male buddies avoid at all costs. Post-class practice is enough to humanise Rosemary, and from there on it's more or less an inevitability that Gabe's innards start to turn cartwheels every time he thinks about or talks to her.

Most of this, I hasten to remind you, is heavily mediated through Gabe's rat-a-tat voiceover walking us through the entirety of his inner monologue, both about the funny feelings he gets and his life in New York more generally. And a few fantasy sequences dart through, to underline the mental chaos going on in his life over the two weeks depicted onscreen. It's entirely fair to say that in its extant state, Little Manhattan depends to an utterly absurd degree on the charm of Gabe himself, and the skill of the actor inhabiting him to handle Flackett's dialogue, which doesn't feel like an adult's failed attempt to put age-appropriate words into a child's mouth, so much as it shrinks an adult down into a child and scales back his vocabulary as necessary. Everything about Little Manhattan unnerves me at least a little bit, but the part that unnerves me most is that the heavily ironic tone Hutcherson is made to bear, and his voluminous self-awareness about being a fifth-grader marching through romantic comedy tropes, makes it feel like the film is meant for an adult audience of at least some genre sophistication (so to with the music cues and limited pop culture references), while the actual, like, existence of it seems to imply that it's for kids, or at least for kids and parents to enjoy as a whole family.

Anyway, whatever its peculiarities, Hutcherson does, in fact do more than able work in the central role; I might find it in me to be snitty enough to suggest that he's legitimately more interesting in this part and the character he creates more complete and alive than his infinitely more visible performance as the charmingly sexless non-boyfriend in the Hunger Games pictures. It's something about finding the exact level of archness and frank sincerity required to make Gabe feel like a real romantic lead, while also justifying the thick veneer of artifice that the structure and tone insist upon (the same mixture makes Hutcherson a perfect candidate to play Bradley Whitford's son, as it happens).

It's a bit silly to say that Little Manhattan only works when it has Hutcherson onscreen, driving things; that would imply that it has any other kind of scene. But it's certainly the case that most of the other elements don't particularly work, or are neutral at best: Ray is constrained by a role that's conceived as a deliberate impenetrable blank, and no child actor could be expected to have the skill set to enliven a character whose inner life takes place entirely off the page. And director Mark Levin cedes far too much of the movie to Hutcherson to help her cheat her way into an interesting performance (Levin also borrows the useful trick in shooting movies around child actors of keeping the frame at their own height, hardly creative or radical by 2005, but still a useful way of dignifying the characters' story instead of turning them into a kind of gimmick). The tone of the script can't decide between a guileless sense of cute, or dry irony, and while Hutcherson's line deliveries invariably favor the latter, the sense that the movie constantly wants to charm our socks off keeps jamming up against how visibly hard it's straining to reach that charm.

Yet the irony works, and until it goes wildly off the rails in the last three minutes to deliver a series of the most shockingly incorrect life lessons ("and because of all this, I learned that love is nothing but a series of grand gestures, and the little moments in between are just details"), it's even sweetly insightful about how mindblowingly horrifying it is to find oneself with unwanted and unfamiliar romantic feelings, if one is a boy, at least. That, plus how unabashedly unlike anything else I've seen it is, no matter how much it leans on genre tropes, makes it hard to deny that it's a somewhat beguiling curiosity. It is not, I think, a good film on top of that. But curiosities don't get a whole lot curiouser.

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MILES TO GO BEFORE WE SLEEP

A review requested by Arlo Banta, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

If you are like me at all, the notion of Cartoon Network making its first-ever miniseries probably budged you not at all, and knowing that this miniseries was greeted with almost exclusively enthusiastic reviews only made it worse. For critics and audiences have something they look for out of Cartoon Network stuff, and they find it, God bless 'em - but it is not and has really never been what I look for. So if you are like me, you sat out Over the Garden Wall during its premiere week in November, 2014, and that was a tremendous mistake. It's not perfect, mostly because it's still buried in the Cartoon Network house style - series creator Patrick McHale, and a great deal of the writing and design staff, logged plenty of hours with Adventure Time - which I can't help but feel isn't the perfect fit for what's going on here. But for an imperfect thing, it's extraordinarily special, and goes straight onto the pile of things I'm angry weren't around yet when I was a child, because it must be truly wonderful to be able to encounter this from that perspective, rather than trying to fake one's way into it.

The story is broken into ten episodes of eleven minutes each, bound in pairs for the purposes of television scheduling. And it is certainly episodic, far more than it seems explicitly serial. Almost half of the episodes could be dropped entirely without leaving any meaningful gaps in the story; yet it's also impossible to think of it working as well without all of them in place (and, for that matter, impossible to think of this as really just a 110-minute story divided into chunks; it takes great care to use the episode breaks as a way to let the viewer recalibrate and push the narrative ahead so that it's always perpetually starting in medias res). What those seemingly random misadventures in the middle actual do is to give the whole story the feeling of Pilgrim's Progress, in which each disconnected episode serves to change the characters in small but cumulative ways that leave them able to leave the story very differently than they began it. And the series knows this, explicitly dropping the word "pilgrim" at one point. It also draws from The Divine Comedy, giving its pilgrims a guide named Beatrice, because once you've started in with the classical religious literature references in your TV kids' cartoon, you might as well just keep doubling down on it.

The pilgrims are Wirt (Elijah Wood) and Gregory (Collin Dean), half-brothers who find themselves, at the start of the first episode "The Old Grist Mill", confused as to where they are, how they got there, and how to get home. Teenage Wirt does, at least. Little Gregory is living in a sort of constant present tense, totally unconcerned with anything in the dark woods or with his brother's nervousness, and mostly interested in giving a name to the frog he's carrying around. Also, Wirt is dressed like a garden gnome and Gregory has a teapot on his head, facts which seem to bother none of the equally inexplicable characters they meet during their journey. The first of these, and the ones who come back the most, are a talking bluebird, the aforementioned Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey), so there's some Der Ring des Nibelungen in there on top of the rest of it, and an old woodsman (Christopher Lloyd), who skulks around in the most menacing sort of way and acts exactly the way you'd expect someone to right before he buries an axe in your head, and yet her turns out to be almost unfailingly helpful, pointing out that the boys need to be constantly aware of the Beast that haunts those woods.

The show ultimately reveals its backstory, near the end, and it's perfectly timed; by that point, we've gotten used to the steady rhythm of the show (each episode follows the structure of "Wirt and Gregory find themselves in some new mad place, and by their actions better the lives of the inhabitants, without advancing their trip home by a noticeable amount"), and have seen enough of the changes in the boys that being sent back to square one with both of them is a bit of a shock, and it helps to clarify the show's overarching themes. Which I'd be reluctant to discuss too much for fear of spoiling things - though as befits something targeting children, it's really not hard for a particularly genre-savvy adult to guess the basic shape of the show fairly early on. Let's just say that neither the Pilgrim's Progress nor Divine Comedy references are at all incidental, and the show's overall message is a surprisingly moralistic one: in order to move towards the goal, one must make a reckoning of the kind of person that one has been, and take steps to be better.

For as surprisingly sophisticated as the series is - it trusts its audience to be willing to think hard about life and themselves more than any other piece of American children's entertainment from the 21st Century that I can immediately call to mind - it has enough immediate pleasures that it's already proven to be singularly engaging and compelling long before the thematic shape starts to become clear. There's mood and atmosphere to spare here: it is set in timeless autumn, and everything about the color palette, lighting, and even the stories emphasises this. The second episode, "Hard Times at the Huskin' Bee", is an especially beautiful evocation of a harvest festival atmosphere, and like most of the other episodes, it has the shape of a ghost story to be shared over a campfire as the air grows cold. The seventh episode, "The Ringing of the Bell", includes an image that even managed to freak me out, wizened old horror buff that I am, not least because of the slow, inexorable way it builds to its big scare, and then suddenly ramps forward at the last second to hit harder when it arrives.

But then, the whole show exists in a discordant world of fable and horror, taking things that are normal and common and warping them through the medium of animation and the writers' offbeat comic sensibilities (it's also one of the best blends of comedy and horror I've seen in a long while, allowing that the kiddie-postmodern Cartoon Network sense of humor is not really the same as my own) to make them strange and oddly threatening even at their kindest. Like the never-homicidal but always terrifying woodsman, or the sweet Beatrice, brilliantly voiced by a best-in-show Lynskey as sunshine and optimism, even when she makes it clear that she honestly kind of hates both of the boys. It's an ethereal show, that's what it is, one that feels like bedtime stories and weird dreams made up of snatches of urban legends. Further pulling it out of time, the whole series is driven extensively by music: both flat-out musical numbers, but more often its deeply insinuating and atmospheric score, composed by a group called the Blasting Company. It's a mixture of folk music, pre-WWII pop, and a kind of Victorian-feeling dance music; a polyglot that at any rate feels like it could have been assembled, in exactly its present form, at any point from the 1930s onwards. It adds immeasurably to the sense of timelessness and placelessness of the show - it might, indeed, be the case that the music is the most important single element of the series, more than the backgrounds and color and their peerless evocation of autumn, more than the colorful voice acting, more than the light but never unserious dialogue. It's remarkable to listen to, elegiac and romantic and funny all at the same time.

And I have put off talking about the animation, because I loved Over the Garden Wall, but I loved that the least. It's certainly an intentional show, in terms of its design: there's a pronounced affection for the Fleischer cartoons of the '30s, which I'd ordinarily love, and in the one big '30s showcase sequence, a dream that occurs in the eighth episode, it works perfectly. But the broad, round cartooning seems a little too, I don't quite know, too frivolous? It resembles Adventure Time by feeling somewhat like the sketches an especially talented grade school student might make, given life, and that's an admirable aesthetic mindset in many of their projects. But given how much of Over the Garden Wall is cemented in folk art, having the big eyes and internet-comic goofiness of the characters strikes me as a little off. It's surely the case that the non-human characters, and the most overtly grotesque and otherworldly of the humans, look more appropriate than the leads, or the "normal" people they stumble across through their adventures. Gregory, in particular, looks too much like a doodle; I won't deny that it takes skill to animate someone like that and give him a real, obvious personality, but I simply don't like looking at him. It is, of course, a taste issue. But we all have our own tastes, and no matter how much is going right with a thing, that's an insurmountable obstacle.

Still, everything else goes right with Over the Garden Wall, so I don't want to harp on it. The world and the stories told in are so compelling that the rather generic protagonists are only a little liability; and I am powerless to resist anything that does such a great job of communicating the damp cool and colorful weariness of autumn through purely visual means. This is one of the most entrancing works of animation I've seen in a long time, even if the animation is, itself, nothing terribly special, and if nothing else, it's already permanently secured itself a spot in my annual Halloween week viewing schedule.

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METALHEAD

A review requested by Caleb Wimble, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The danger of talking about The Iron Giant years later is that it's enormously tempting to talk about in terms of how nobody ever talks about it or has ever seen it, and thus joining the seemingly limitless number of essays on the same topic. It's a prime example of the paradox of the film that everybody agrees that nobody else likes.

And yet, as long as we live in a world where The Iron Giant isn't readily mentioned in conversations about the masterpieces of American animation, then yes, not enough people have seen and love it. It really is that good - it is maybe my favorite animated feature made in the English language without any kind of financial stake from the Walt Disney Company. This despite being an incredibly obvious re-tread of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial that waxes nostalgic for boyhood during the Eisenhower era to a degree that should by rights be impenetrable to anybody who didn't experience that firsthand - including the film's director and scenarist, Brad Bird, who was born in the same year that the film is set, 1957. And yet, it's an exemplary work of storytelling that uses its period to inform and deepen its emotions rather than as self-indulgent window dressing, using its boilerplate "boy and his pet monster" hook with a level of sensitivity, charm, and insight into the somewhat ugly ways of childhood like just about nothing else from that particular wing of children's cinema. By rights, it should have put Warner Bros. Feature Animation on the map, instead of serving as one of the primary nails in that studio's coffin, though it had the benefit of raising Bird's already admirable profile high enough that he was invited to the inner sanctums of Pixar, where he made The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and arguably bettered himself. Arguably.

For bettering The Iron Giant is not the kind of thing that happens every day, neither as a work of animation nor as a adventure fable. The story, adapted from Ted Hughes's 1968 children's book The Iron Man (and more directly Pete Townshend's 1989 concept album based upon it) so loosely that it's almost impossible to detect the ingredients beyond the existence of the title character, takes us to the world of the '50s as seen by a child but understood by an adult: it's set in a small town nestled in the Maine woods, the kind that its protagonist finds best for wandering around aimlessly and endlessly riffing on the pulpy pop culture of the day, while the calm, "everything was simpler" attitude insisted upon by the light touch and warm re-creation of period detail runs up hard against the steady hum of Cold War paranoia that's everywhere in the movie even before it starts to specifically direct the plot. This is, then, a child's-eye-view movie released in 1999 that requires a working knowledge of 1950s politics to even start unpacking it, and I suppose this probably has as much to do with its utter commercial failure as anything else (that, and the perversely bad marketing that allowed the film to slip in and out of theaters without hardly anyone but appreciative critics noticing).

In particular, it centers on Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), a preteen boy obsessed with science fiction and largely disliked by his peer group, leaving him with no companions but his widowed mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) and his wild and woolly imagination. The first thing to even slightly take him out of his shell comes when he meets Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick, Jr.), at the restaurant where his mother works; the arrival of a hip artist-type - Dean works at the local junkyard, for the access to scrap metal that he twists into sculptures - is the boy's first indication that people with different attitudes and interests about the world than the rest of the sturdy folk of Rockwell, Maine (how's that for a leading place name?) exist. The more important thing that happens is that while Hogarth tears ass around the woods, playing at whatever goofy superhero nonsense he has in mind that afternoon, he stumbles across a huge human-shape creature made of metal. We know, from the first scene, that the creature arrived from outer space, coincidentally around the same time that the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and inaugurated the Space Race. That's really all we ever know, and the iron giant can't provide any more information; it received a dent to the head causing it to suffer from whatever robots have in place of amnesia. But for a fanciful kid like Hogarth, with his addiction to comic books, all that matters is that he has a metal man of the coolest sort to be his new best and only friend. And that would be that, except that the giant's tendency to eat huge chunks of metal has caught the attention of the young NSA, who arrives in the form of the arrogant, preening Agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) to poke around and generally be a prick while Hogarth and Dean work to keep the giant's existence a secret.

That could be, and has been, the basic shape of too many movies, but The Iron Giant is made up of almost nothing but reasons why it's better than all of them. The most accessible reason is the simplest: it has a pair of absolutely wonderful characters in Hogarth and the giant, with terrific performances to match: Marienthal won that year's Annie award for voice acting, while the giant's grunts and handful of coherent vocalisations are provided by Vin Diesel, whose visible career to that point functionally consisted of nothing but a part in the ensemble of Saving Private Ryan that nobody has ever declared to be one of that film's highlights. And yet he's devastating in the tiny confines of the part, turning guttural Frankensteinian utterances of monosyllables into a beautiful portrait of straightforward emotional vulnerability and honesty that ranks among the most moving vocal performances in animation (on the evidence of this and his utterly sweet turn in the 15-years-younger Guardians of the Galaxy, it seems fair to suggest that Diesel's perfect career would consist of nothing but voiceover work with a severely limited vocabulary).

To pair with these terrific performances, the animators created two fantastic characters - the giant is the obvious triumph, a mixture of clunky and sleek elements that evokes '50s sci-fi and comics without being needlessly constrained by it, and permits enough range of motion in the character's face and body that it can communicate all the feelings it could ever need without having to fake it by flexing its rigid metal parts. And it's also the first major character in an otherwise traditionally-animated feature to have been made entirely through CGI, though unlike Disney's awkward early experiments in that direction, the CGI effects were all coated in "paint" that made them match the cel animation more cleanly than in many lusher, costlier productions from the 1990s. But as brilliant as the giant is, I honestly find myself more impressed with Hogarth: the humans in the film are all exaggerated characters of human form, gangly and angular and at times unafraid to be a little off-putting and ugly; it gives the film a hell of a lot of personality and makes it one of the very few major studio animated features of its generation to do anything other than blindly try to copy Disney, for good (DreamWorks's Prince of Egypt) or ill (Warner's own Quest for Camelot). The downside is that the rushed, somewhat inexperienced team of animators (though supervised overall by high-ranking Disney vet Tony Fucile) was sometimes stymied in making these unconventional shapes move properly, and if I could dredge up the single meaningful flaw in The Iron Giant, it would be that most of its cast can be unpleasant to look at in the wrong ways, and often unexpressive. But Hogarth triumphs over all that; he was drawn with care, patience, and love, and he's one of the most vivid, feeling protagonists in an American cartoon to be found anywhere in that last heyday of theatrical 2-D animation.

The film is a visual success for reasons entirely unrelated to its characters, though; the design team created a version of small town Americana that is at once both detailed and realistic in it smallest touches of props and interior design, while also gauzy in places after the fashion of '50s art (Norman Rockwell himself is a clear touchstone). Even more impressively, it manages to evoke the overblown colors and compositional strategies of '50s cinematography, feeling at times like a bunch of animators decided to turn their boys' own sci-fi adventure into a crypto-homage to Douglas Sirk.

Hell, there are scenes where it plays around with out-of-focus foregrounds to pull attention to the middle of the frame, in a 2-D animated film. Which is one of the most pointlessly showy things you can do, though it adds immeasurably to the film's reality, and the sense that the characters exist in a place that's physically tangible to them, if not to us. If there's a single meaningless flaw that nonetheless keeps kicking at the back of my seat as I watch the movie, it's that it does feel at times a bit too much of a "look at us! we're awesome! we can play with the big boys!" tech exercise; a snowstorm that doesn't need to be there except to show off that the animators could put together a hell of a snowstorm; lighting that calls attention to how difficult it would be to carry it off; a couple of jarringly ambitious camera movements.

But then, as a tech exercise, it proves exactly that, and the fact that this team couldn't keep making movies at Warner to rival or better what Disney and DreamWorks were working on before the bottom fell out of 2-D animation is one of the great lost chances in the medium's recent history. At least we got Bird out of it, and in Bird we have one of the most reliable directors in contemporary Hollywood; and at least we have the film itself, which is all the more precious for being the one shining triumph of the studio that made it. This is, in every way, one of the highlights of both animation and family-friendly cinema in the last quarter-century, a bottomless pleasure no matter how unfairly obscured by market indifference and evolving tastes.

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