Strange Habits

I watch the newest film from Walt Disney Animation Studios. I reflect on having watched every film from Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Prologue: What This Entry Isn’t About

Official additions to the complete reading list since last entry are three children’s books: Stop Following Me, Moon! by Darren Farrell and Give This Book Away! and Dandelion Magic: Go Ahead, Make Your Wish!, both written by Darren Farrell and illustrated by Maya Tatsukawa.

Prose and comics, I’m quadruple-fisting over here. I’ve been procrastinating on finishing that Woolf novel while the DVD of the filmed version is waiting for me to pick it up at the library. I’m thoroughly digging my third read-through of The Black Dahlia by Ellroy. Re-reading School Is Hell by Matt Groening and looking into the legendary newspaper comics of E.C. Segar with the first deluxe Fantagraphics collection Popeye: I Yam What I Yam!

More to say on Orlando, the Dahlia, school/Hell and Popeye et al in due course.

Now let’s get some strange.

Part I: What I’ve Done

For this entry I watched the 2022 film Strange World, directed by Don Hall. Strange World is the sixty-first feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios. In previous entries I wrote about Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto and mentioned a bit of background about my approach to these films: during the height of pandemic isolation, before I began to occupy myself with writing One Could Argue, I was obsessively watching every single feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios in chronological order.

I started with the very first film they put out in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and scorched a blazing path of way too much free time straight to Frozen II, getting there by often watching two and occasionally as many as three feature films in one day. It’s telling that it was in between running out of extant Disney films and the release of the next new one Raya and the Last Dragon when I started writing this newsletter; apparently when I ran out of Disney pictures at that bleak point in February of 2021 I really needed a new obsessive/repetitive hobby. Particularly since I was still living in Seattle at the time, which was a pretty lousy place to be around then and which I don’t miss and to which I haven’t subsequently returned. And since I had been watching even a shit-tonnier shit-ton of pictures than usual and have never not had strong opinions about whatever movies violate my airspace, I must have been verily bristling with the need to find voice for my feelings — not about Disney movies specifically but about whatever I happened to be watching at any given time of writing.

One Could Argue was inaugurated. I made no mention of what I had just gone through with the Disney-watching project. No point in bringing it up at the time. But I had reason to give a little background on it when Raya and the Last Dragon became the first Disney feature I wrote about for One Could Argue. In late 2021 Encanto was released and became the second (keeping up with these films as they are released is an ongoing part of my life now). Though I own that apparently my finger isn’t on the pulse these days; I didn’t even know Strange World, which has been out since the fall of 2022, existed until a few days before I sat down to get caught up and watch it.

At some point after I ran out of available Disney films I also set up a spreadsheet to rank-order every one of these films in terms of my own personal judgment of all-around quality. I alluded to this in my review of Raya and the Last Dragon and included my picks for the fifteen best films from the Studios but didn’t mention that they were the result of my meticulously and methodologically ranking ALL OF THE DISNEY FEATURES from the very best to the very worst.

On the one hand this is obviously completely a subjective statement of relative quality, which made it a highly quixotic undertaking. I even have a note on my spreadsheet that these are “current rankings in order (subject to revision).”

On the other hand, for whatever sick reasons I waste my time doing this shit, I don’t do it without a sense of deadly seriousness. For better and worse that’s just part of who I am, and that ability to expend time and burn calories comparing and debating the relative merits of works of art has served me well in life and also gotten me into trouble, often in the same breath. I regret nothing.

In any case, as frivolous an undertaking as this has always been, I went into it with an honest intention that I would quality-rank these films in an order that appears uniformly “correct” to me, according to my own personal tastes and standards. Mileage may vary and anyone is free, in fact is strongly encouraged, to differ with my views, but I had to treat this ranking process as if it were an objective statement of fact and moreover as if anything of any significance actually depended on it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it, and if I was gonna do it, I might as well was gonna do it right.

Part II: The Films

To this end I established three tiers of quality and started by examining every title and considering into which tier it should fall. At the time, before the release of Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto, I ended up with seventeen films in Tier 1, twenty-two films in Tier 2 and nineteen films in Tier 3. If I was operating on any desire to have the tiers align so closely in terms of quantity it was entirely subconscious: as stated above, my honest intention was to consider each individual film on its own merits and place it in one of three tiers merely as a sorting device, a rough jumping-off point that would help me begin to figure out how to compare each of them to all of the others.

Let’s do my complete rankings, from worst to best. Keep in mind this is not the order in which I watched these; that sequence was strictly chronological. This is me rearranging the titles into a worst-to-best formation. Productions from Walt Disney Animation Studios, some of which are among the greatest ever produced in any genre or format, are massively demanding team efforts that definitely belie the concept of the film auteur, so I’m gonna forego listing the directorial personnel and stick simply to titles and years of release.

• Oliver & Company, 1988. It would be bad enough to cite a painfully sappy, deeply boring and sometimes incoherent story, paper-thin characterization and some of the most sublimely shitty animation the Studios ever let reach the theater. But to top it all off this picture also has a soundtrack of songs by Billy Joel.

• Chicken Little, 2005.

• Ralph Breaks the Internet, 2018.

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire, 2001. Disney siphoning some aesthetic fuel from Batman: The Animated Series and associated productions. Doing it arguably less than half as well for I bet more than twice the price.

• The Black Cauldron, 1985. Misguided, half-assed wizards ‘n warriors fantasy. The Studios were in very rough shape around this time, having registered a slew of dreary, uninventive and lackadaisical submissions from the mid-Sixties into the Eighties, eventually bottoming out with Oliver & Company.

• Big Hero 6, 2014.

• Dinosaur, 2000. I love dinosaurs and there is some cool animation of them in this picture but everything else about it is pretty shit.

• Wreck-It Ralph, 2012. Some really cool visuals and animation here and there and some alright voice-acting but this movie is overall really dumb and is constantly badgering you to high-five it for making broad video game references.

• The Fox and the Hound, 1981.

• Treasure Planet, 2002.

• Robin Hood, 1973.

• Brother Bear, 2003. This one had a cool idea changing the screen format midway through the movie but didn’t really pick up that ball and run with it.

• Fantasia 2000, 1999.

• Meet the Robinsons, 2007.

• The Aristocats, 1970.

• Strange World, 2022. Ranking this took some serious consideration on my part and I’m still not sure I got it right, but I started at the top of the list and kept working my way down thinking “not better than that, not better than that, not better than that” until I found a peculiar spot for this one nestled in between two modestly bad offerings from decades prior.

• The Sword in the Stone, 1963. This one has some good and noteworthy moments going for it but not nearly enough to make it more than, or even as much as, the sum of its parts. Disney films are often genuinely unsettling but when as here they are too disturbingly bleak and dour without a crust of levity they can fall right apart onscreen.

• The Jungle Book, 1967.

• Pocahontas, 1995.

• Melody Time, 1948.

• The Rescuers, 1977.

• Fun and Fancy Free, 1947.

• The Emperor’s New Groove, 2000.

• Make Mine Music, 1946.

• Frozen II, 2019. My then-girlfriend and I watched this together and at one point about halfway through I observed her furrowing her brow in consternation at the screen. I asked if everything was okay and she said “I’m just trying to figure out what this movie’s about.”

• Bolt, 2008.

• Saludos Amigos, 1943. First appearance of the character José Carioca, who reappears in the staggeringly great The Three Caballeros much closer to the end of this list.

• Hercules, 1997. James Woods does good voice-acting in this one.

• Home on the Range, 2004. This movie is pretty good overall; definitely Disney not swinging for the fences and offering something more restrained and less ambitious than people of my age had become accustomed to during the bravura run the Studios had during our upbringing. What will always endear Home on the Range to me is the inconceivably beautiful and well-crafted song “Little Patch of Heaven” with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater and interpreted in a life-restoring honey-and-velvet vocal performance by k.d. lang. I doubt I’ll ever have motivation to sit through Home on the Range again but I still revisit “Little Patch of Heaven” because it’s compulsively listenable.

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996.

• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, 1977.

• The Rescuers Down Under, 1990. This one has a discordant tone but some ambitious animation and genuinely innovative and exciting action sequences. I wonder if they would have done better to make this a standalone adventure with new characters instead of a Rescuers sequel. (It is a marked improvement over the original The Rescuers.)

• The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949. This one is divided into two discrete segments, each based on a classic work of literature, though it was the part based on The Wind in the Willows and NOT the “Headless Horseman” The Legend of Sleepy Hollow sequence that gave me nightmares as a kid. I absolutely could not emotionally handle the parts where Toad gets convicted and incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit and then becomes a hunted fugitive escapee. I guess it touched some deep libertarian part of me that was terrified of the overweening power of the state. Toad just seemed so helplessly isolated and punished through no malicious fault of his own, for no reason other than his own eccentricity and lack of self-control. I’m figuring out a lot about myself by writing this paragraph; lemme know what I owe you for reading it.

• Tangled, 2010.

• Raya and the Last Dragon, 2021.

• Encanto, 2021.

• Aladdin, 1992. Has a lot of good going for it. Overrated. Robin Williams’s legendary sweat act performance was always a bit much for me.

• The Great Mouse Detective, 1986. The only through-and-through good movie the Studios produced in between One Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961 and The Little Mermaid in 1989.

• Alice in Wonderland, 1951. Not just unsettling but even grisly and frightening. Shows off one of the Studios’ gutsiest impulses: to use the animated format to play with visual concepts that are ambitious, highly experimental, downright psychedelic and often astonishingly, dazzlingly beautiful. Psychedelia is a hallmark of Disney at their best; paradoxically it is often the weirdest and most enthralling when the Studios pursue it almost for its own sake and even approach divorcing it from the needs of the story altogether. We’re getting into that territory with the trippy Alice in Wonderland, which in Disney’s telling is basically a fever dream about being stuck in a world where no one will give you a straight answer about anything. The people in charge of character design and voice casting must have had a blast with this production.

• Lady and the the Tramp, 1955. This one had a lot more depth, heart and beautiful animation than I remembered from seeing it as a small child.

• Peter Pan, 1953.

• Mulan, 1998.

• Sleeping Beauty, 1959. For a movie ranked this high on the list, this one is a little out of balance: a bit light on good story structure and dialogue but heavvvvy on good visuals. This one seems to be the first time that the Studios crafted a whole aesthetic for a movie that made it look at least in part like it was animated in the art style roughly from the time in which it was set. In other words much of Sleeping Beauty is designed to look like it’s right out of an illuminated manuscript from like the thirteenth century or something.

• Winnie the Pooh, 2011. Why did the Studios choose to recircle territory they had already ineffectually puttered around in back in 1977? But then the results were surprisingly very strong in 2011. This movie turned out very well, so obviously someone knew what they were doing when they opted against novelty here and revisited the Disney/Pooh mythos.

• Tarzan, 1999.

• Cinderella, 1950. During the War years the Studios had pivoted to focus entirely on “package” presentations along the model of Fantasia — feature-length productions that bundled shorter sequences together, some of them thematically linked and some entirely standalone. I’m reasoning that this was because the top animation technicians were reassigned to Disney’s output of wartime propaganda and the B-team was scraping and stitching these package films together to stay sharp and keep their profile up. Cinderella is a big, decade-inaugurating return to the single-story feature format and they weren’t fuckin’ around here. This is a big postwar reassertion of quality and ambition from the Studios and it comes off very well all around.

• The Princess and the Frog, 2009. I don’t hear this one brought up as a great movie as often as I would like but it’s really worth a close look. Lots of great stuff going on here.

• Frozen, 2013. We’re firmly in “great movie” territory from here on out. Watching Frozen for this project was my first time watching it at all and I was really pleased to see that it lives up to and perhaps even exceeds the hype.

• One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1961. Great contemporary period design — Disney does Swinging London and does it functionally and beautifully. The rest of the movie holds up great too.

• Lilo & Stitch, 2002. A peculiar fabric of disparate elements that is woven together into a beautiful, inventive, unique, fun and charming movie. I remember being struck by how great the animators’ character acting is for the Lilo character in this picture. Has some great science fiction ideas to play with and ties in with a moving family arc that somehow makes the space alien component of the story feel as plausible as the kitchen sink drama. Disney professionals do that kind of thing better than anyone else ever, aligning the whimsically or nightmarishly fantastical along the same plane of reality as the soulfully relatable and believable and making you accept, for ninety minutes at a time, that these universes are as real and possible as our own. Lilo & Stitch is one of their most unusual and best offerings.

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937. They were still figuring out what they were doing when they made the first-ever animated feature film but were already leagues ahead of any competition and definitely had more guts and vision than most of the live-action film industry of the time. If it had been made later Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would have had a much smoother structure and some better character development, but a first effort at this level of ambition is a stunning achievement on its own imperfect merits. And it inaugurated a jaw-dropping run of quality across the next four productions from the Studios.

• The Lion King, 1994. I expected this one to have dimmed in quality with the passage of time, but the opposite turns out to be true. I remember as a child arguing with some skeptical other boys that the “Be Prepared” musical sequence was a nod to Nazism. But I was shocked and elated on my first adult watch-through to see that I was even righter than I thought: the whole point of the song is about about filling the empty heads of useful idiots with fanficul promises that you will fix all of their problems and, once you have them on side, being “prepared” to use your overwhelming numbers and riled-up populous to seize power through nefarious and immoral means. In a gorgeous and harrowing sequence that must have been pulled in part from like old Riefenstahl films and such, the animators even have the villain Scar’s hyena storm-troopers literally goose-stepping in lockstep past his dictatorial rostrum while he watches in tyrannical approval. Some of our pathetic would-be authoritarians of today could only hope to do as well as this cartoon lion. The Disney people of the Nineties were trying to tell us something about believing the promises of smooth-talking wannabe populist leaders who caress our amygdalae by promising utopia at the price of our reason and cognitive faculties. More of us who seem to have missed this point as Nineties kids should revisit The Lion King. Plus just about everything else in this movie is outstanding. Even the music from the banal and badly overrated Elton John works because it fits in tonally with the rest of the picture and isn’t leaned on excessively, though this movie just might have jumped a few ranks up for me if they had gotten the Elton John involvement-level down to a Platonic ideal of zero.

• Zootopia, 2016. An all-around great movie set in a hypothetical city where all different types of anthropomorphic mammals have to coexist with, tolerate and even learn to like one another. Besides being beautifully animated and having a brisk, engrossing and well-structured mystery/adventure storyline, this one has some timely comments about looking past our superficial differences, questioning our first impressions, forgiving ourselves and one another for our mistakes in life and standing alone against institutional corruption and societal pressure. Zootopia is not to be missed.

• The Little Mermaid, 1989. Justly-venerated outing that famously brought the Studios out of a period of solvency-threatening stagnation. Great story, voice acting and animation. Excellent singing enlivens brilliantly-written songs.

• Moana, 2016. This came out right after Zootopia and the Studios appeared to be settling into a nice groove here (it didn’t last). Moana has everything that makes a Disney picture great in one movie. To cite a few: a novel setting, beautiful visuals, great and sometimes offbeat casting, a hero quest that celebrates curiosity, bravery and exploration, a frightening and complex villain figure and great music. (Was this Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first time writing stuff for Disney? He’s a good fit for the Studios, though I found his work on Encanto somewhat overheated and tiresome compared with Moana.)

• Bambi, 1942.

• Pinocchio, 1940.

• Fantasia, 1940. Is it true that when Eisenstein saw Fantasia he proclaimed Walt Disney to be “the only true filmmaker in the world”? That anecdote made a big impression on me when I heard it. Which I think was in a lecture or comment by Peter Greenaway.

• The Three Caballeros, 1945. This is one of those wartime package films I mentioned above and like most of those it is sometimes thematically discordant, though it certainly does maintain a consistent level of quality. But I cannot rank it lower than this because the parts that work don’t merely work, they are some of the most beautiful, psychedelic, bizarre, high-contrast, radioactively-glowing animated images I have ever seen blossom, shift, melt and reform before my unbelieving eyes. The “Three Caballeros” are Donald Duck and two coequal animated birds from Brazil and Mexico respectively, José Carioca and Panchito Pistoles, and it is the sequences with these characters and assorted guests (some of them live actors interacting with animation as in Fantasia) that are the truly sublime, insane and wonderment-inducing parts of this film. As I said above, the freedom to explore psychedelic visual components with which the animated medium imbued the Studios was an early trademark of their output. But apparently while everyone was focused on the War effort and no one was keeping an eye on the mischievous and playful geniuses behind The Three Caballeros, they wanted to see how wide and far they could go with it. This movie is an absolute stunner that will absorb your attention, smear your eyeballs with bright colors and trippy patterns and have your foot tapping much of the way through.

• Dumbo, 1941. Overall arguably better than The Three Caballeros because of its cohesiveness and it has the psychedelic nightmare of the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence. Intermittently approaches the levels of genius of The Three Caballeros but it could be argued that Dumbo holds together better as a single artistic statement. Tough call.

• Beauty and the Beast, 1991. The best and the one that simply has it all, that gets every single component, choice, gesture, note, frame just right. The masterpiece.

Part III: Strange World or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About a Film That Doesn’t Work and Keep Watching Films From Walt Disney Animation Studios

Strange World has a very rosy and hip political outlook and it manages to get it across in an only slightly cringe tone. It’s got a basically unobjectionable progressive vision of the kind of world any honest and decent person should want to idealize, a diverse, cosmopolitan melting pot in which our superficial differences in color, sex and sexuality are accepted to the point of being able to go unremarked upon. In other words in terms of the (fussily over-curated) racial, ethnic and sexual diversity of its cast of human characters it presents some utopian version of a kind of society we should all want to live in and will always have to keep working to navigate towards. But interestingly Strange World has the concept to overlay this ideal not atop a futuristic setting but onto a future/retro hybrid environment — to make contented, functional societal diversity a component of a steampunk universe. The characters in the socially and scientifically advanced but aesthetically and geographically retrograde setting of Strange World take the superficial differences between them in stride and don’t stop to question or comment upon them. They just accept everyone for who she or he is as an individual and don’t give it another thought, as if this state of affairs were some Arcadian vision from the past to which we real people should aspire to return.

This is the second Walt Disney Animation Studios feature in a row to involve a tiny and secluded community that is surrounded by impassible mountains. In covering Encanto I wrote about an interesting trend instantiated in Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto that seems to mark a conscious and specific new direction, new model for films from the Studios. Call it “No Quests, No Villains.”

In Strange World they make direct and knowing reference to this trend, specifically refuting the criticisms and queries about this that they must have been getting for a few years now: a character in Strange World actually says aloud, more for our benefit than for the other characters to whom he’s speaking, that “there are no bad guys! The objective isn’t to kill or destroy monsters. You’re just supposed to build a working civilization utilizing the environment around you!”

This amounts to no less than a Statement of Values for the “No Quests, No Villains” ethos. This new model posits that quests shouldn’t be external but internal. Raya and the Last Dragon isn’t into venturing beyond known borders but would prefer we stick to sojourning around trying to unite the warring factions of a divided nation. In Encanto it is not enough to not cross the magic mountains but rather the entire hero quest is directly inverted into a pyschological journey inwards into the depths of familial dysfunction lurking in the hidden corridors of the family home. And in Strange World an ardent interest in exploration and trailblazing is disdained in favor of staying right where you and growing plants that miraculously provide limitless power to a miraculously-perfectly-functioning economy. In all three films there is no villain per se — there are only challenges to community, to health, to stability. And in these days of Disney such challenges are pretty boring and mild ones of the rounded-edges and plush-toy flavor. As I conjectured before, this isn’t necessarily bad and is even kind of interesting as a kind of cultural EKG for our moment. But it is starting to wear a bit thin since the films, three in a row now, just aren’t that good.

To further implicate Strange World in this downward trend, it’s one thing to forego the Call to Adventure and the restless spirit as Disney did with Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto but it’s quite another to take an open stance against exploration itself as Strange World goes out of its fumbling, cringey way to do. Strange World sets up a false dichotomy in which the will to explore and the need to nurture and sustain are in opposition to one another. This anti-explorationism is a drag and is probably morally wrong and in any case is not how we conscious creatures are wired.

“We were voyagers!” exclaims an ecstatic Moana when she has cracked the forgotten legacy of her ancestors and is beginning to embrace her destiny as a fearless explorer who wants to cross seas, confront dangers and populate new lands. And she’s right — there’s a reason so many great human stories, the dashing and thrilling Moana among them, are tales of those who explore, discover, quest and conquer. It’s a deep and important part of what we are as the only aware persons we know of in the universe, the point of contact between the universe and its own ability to wake up to, investigate and pay attention to itself. We are restless wanderers and curiosity machines, which might explain why Strange World feels at conflict with its own desire to be exciting and its open hostility to those who want to cross the mountains and find out what’s over there. It’s supposed to be a message about contentment and sustainability but it tries to sneak a counterfeit “adventure” in and ends up feeling ickily dishonest.

The film makes as if it’s going to chart a synthesis between its explorer character Jaeger Clade and his inventor/farmer son Searcher Clade by forcing them into a family-friendly adventure together in which Searcher’s wife Meridian (subtle names have never been standard-issue in Disney productions) and their son Ethan will help reconcile the warring impulses of Jaeger and Searcher. This finally amounts to some half-assed psuedo-conclusion about how there’s nothing to find on the other side of the mountains to begin with because the continent we live on is itself a living thing of which we are all a smaller part. This is a nice parable but it’s also not true; the continent and planet upon which we live don’t “nurture” or “care” about us and by no means just magically “provide” us with everything we need to live perfect lives in a perfect society. Strange World makes it out as if all Searcher had to do was consider that the glowing plants he saw on the mountainside could provide unlimited energy and sustenance without showing the need for deep creativity, curiosity, intelligence and skill that in the real world would have impelled and enabled a Searcher-like figure to make such a world-altering discovery. Which incidentally is arguably closely connected to the parts of being human that make us want to voyage beyond the seas and mountains. Doing internal emotional work is a fine, worthy and interesting outing for the Encanto family but the Clades are less divided and more deluded than they think they are: the desire to strive for a better society with plenty of energy and the desire to explore and discover new realms and lands and dimensions are two sides of a coin. Strange World seems to want to pull back and look at this coin but can’t quite get it into focus.

The “strange world” of the title most specifically refers to a bizarre kind of subterranean alternative-dimension zone into which the characters have to venture in order to figure out that the continent they live on is a giant organism and that there’s nothing to discover beyond the mountains. These sentimental platitudes just can’t stir the soul like the Call to Adventure and braving of dangers in Moana or Zootopia or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And for that matter the conclusions of Strange World feel less wholesome and meaningful and nourishing than the successful family-therapy session that is Encanto. Strange World is finally a failed attempt to get away with trying to smuggle adventurism back into the Encanto model when they instead should have committed to that model and taken it a step further.

Epilogue: Era-Defining Success

After seeing Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto and ascertaining what the people at Walt Disney Animation Studios were up to, I predicted “that within the next two or three films, Disney will put out something along these same lines that will be an era-defining success on the scale of The Little Mermaid or Frozen.”

Strange World is a noteworthy step in the wrong direction but I’ll keep watching with interest. They are running out of runway with which to prove my prediction right and vindicate their strange but promising new model. I still hope they do.