Cynical Cinema

Michael Sporn has been, for two decades, one of the most under-appreciated animators in the world.  First Run Features has been one of the only distributors to release his half-hour animated films, and now on November 25th, First Run will be releasing a box set of the twelve Michael Sporn films they have released.  Some of them are amazing and classic, some of them are cute at best, but all of them are imaginative and charming.  The animation itself is fairly crude, but the spirit of the films more than makes up for the lack of budget.  Here is a brief rundown of all twelve films:

Abel’s Island (*******7/10):  Based on a book by William Steig, the writer of Shrek, this is the story of a shipwrecked mouse.  When Abel (a mouse) goes on a picnic with his girlfriend, he gets swept away in a torrential rainstorm, and ends up marooned on an island in a river.  (Of course, this is just a small patch of land in a tiny stream, but mice are very small.)  Abel then begins his own little Robinson Crusoe story, building rafts to cross the river and get home.  He sends off a not to his family in a bottle.  He briefly befriends a frog who washes up on the same island.  He builds little clay statues of his family, and after a couple of encounters with a hungry, owl, he begins to go a little crazy.  Eventually, he makes his way back home, and while he doesn’t get the welcome he fully expected, he does re-connect with his girlfriend.

The Story of the Dancing Frog (********8/10):  Told as a story-within-a-story, The Dancing Frog begins with a young child asking his mother questions about his family.  The one story she has yet to tell him is about a woman named Gertrude, who married a sailor.  When that sailor drowns at sea, Gertrude heads down to the river to drown herself.  Because that was apparently the thing to do in those days.  When we later see the river, it is barely even a stream, as she wades across and it is barely even knee-deep.  It would have been awfully difficult to drown oneself in a “river” that size.  But she sees a frog dancing on a lily pad, and decides not to off herself after all.  Soon she is touring the world with the frog, making lots of money and becoming famous. 

Some guy named “Lord Belvedere” keeps trying to marry her, although we never really find out why he finds her attractive, or what his interest is.  They don’t seem to have dated or anything.  Then again, that must also be something that was just the style at the time.  Eventually, the frog proves to have incredible longevity and an ability to cheat death - it leaps from a burning building, 10 stories down into a bucket of water.  And then it lives on, well into old age, after he and Gertrude retire from show business.  Most frogs, I wager, don’t live this long.  The story is sweet, but the best reason to watch this short is the bonkers, crazed expression on the frog’s face when he dances.

The Marzipan Pig (********8/10):  Now this is bonkers.  Based on a book by Russell Hoban, The Marzipan Pig seems to be a rumination on the holistic nature of life, on the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.  Which means it isn’t so much a story as it is a stream-of-consciousness series of events.  And the whole thing begins with a marzipan pig.  Marzipan must be a British thing.  It appears to be some kind of candy, since several characters make reference to the fact that the pig is sweet, and tasty.  Including the mouse who eats him all up.

You see, there is this marzipan pig.  It has fallen behind the couch, and the people have forgotten all about it.  The pig is lonely, but soon a mouse comes by.  The mouse thinks the pig is sweet, and moans “sweetness!  Sweetness!  SWEETNESS!” in a creepy breathy voice as it eats the pig right up.  Then the mouse is lonely, and it wishes that it had waited to hear what the pig had to say before eating it.  The mouse tries to make a connection with a big clock.  It doesn’t work.  So the mouse goes outside, where it is eaten by an owl.  Then the owl falls in love with the glowing light on the meter of a taxi cab.  When the cab driver pulls out his trumpet and plays “When The Saints Go Marching In”, the owl stands outside the taxi and dances.  People throw money.  Eventually, the owl earns enough money so it can take another cab ride and sit next to the glowing meter.

All the characters in this movie are, in some way, looking for love.  From the owl, we move on to a bee who flies into a house and meets a hibiscus flower.  The bee dances for the hibsicus, but it dies and falls to the floor anyway.  The bee flies away, and another mouse comes by and makes herself a dress out of the fallen hibiscus.  The mouse, you see, fancies herself to be a hibiscus flower, and wants to impersonate one at the end of the plant’s stem.  This is a powerful delusion on her part, one which could cause crazy behaviour.  Like sewing a hibiscus costume out of a dead hibiscus flower.  It’s the Silence Of The Lambs mouse.

The mouse falls out the window, and into the bag of a postman.  The mouse bites the postman, who flings it into a tree, where it hits the owl.  Then it falls to the ground, a plant grows, the mouse goes back into the house and finds the mail, in which there is a brand new marzipan pig for the little boy, and this mouse eats up the entire marzipan pig as well.  And then the boy finds the mouse in the hibiscus dress, the mouse runs off, and the whole bonkers thing ends.  And now the mouse dances by the flower under the tree where the owl resides and a faint waft of marzipan floats through the air. 

There is something to the animals-dancing thing in the world of Michael Sporn.  Abel the mouse does a brief dance on his island, the frog’s dancing was the central theme in The Dancing Frog, and in The Marzipan Pig, no fewer than four animals dance.  The two mice, the owl and the bee.  I don’t know if this means anything, just something odd I noticed.

Jazztime Tale (*********9/10):  This film is wonderful.  It’s the story of the young Fats Waller, who would grow up to become one of the great jazz pianists in history.  Ruby Dee provides the voice of the narrator, now an old woman who is reminiscing about her childhood, when her friend Thomas Waller became a famous musician.  As a young girl, the Ruby Dee character was friends with Waller in the black community of New York.  We see Waller become the house pianist at the local movie theatre, playing tunes over the silent movies that would play on the screens.  And we see his big moment, the moment where he broke out and played the jazz tunes on the massive organ, the tunes his preacher father had called “the devil’s music”, and Waller brought the house down.

But really, Waller’s rise to fame is incidental to the story, which is more about a friendship between two young girls that came to be at around the same time.  A young girl named Rose meets Ruby Dee the night of Fats’ big performance, and sneaks into the movie theatre with her family.  They become fast friends, and when Rose’s father (a talent scout) comes to find her in the theatre, he sees the young Fats playing the piano.  And the rest is history.  The music (as it is in most Sporn pictures) is marvelous, and the story is a sweet one.  Sporn seems to be pointedly ignoring the racial issue, as a young white girl and a young black girl become best friends in the 1920s, without any questioning of the situation from any of the adults.  I think the idea is to turn something of a blind eye to that particular problem, and instead focus on that one particular night, Fats Waller, and this lasting friendship.

Whitewash (**********10/10):  Just when I’m getting used to kids movies, and questioning Sporn’s decision not to call attention to racial issues, BOOM!  This is no fairy tale, the story of a young black girl who gets attacked by white racists on her way home from school, and they paint her face white.  The use of the “n” word has rarely been so pointed and brutal in a movie.  Once again, Ruby Dee provides a voice here as the girl’s mother.  Whitewash ends up being very poignant and moving, as a media circus descends on the little girl’s home.  Her classmates at school discuss the incident in class, and they all condemn the incident, and eventually they go to the little girl’s house and walk her to school in a big group.  A fantastic short film.

Champagne (**********10/10):  This is a true story of a young girl, a girl who provides the voice of her own character in the animated short.  As a very small child, she was never cleaned, she was malnourished, and she didn’t go to school, because her mother was a drug addict.  Then her mom went to jail after killing someone.  As Champagne says, it was in self-defense, but her mom was so high she didn’t know what she was doing.  After her mother’s arrest, her life gets better, as she goes to live with her grandma, and gets cleaned up and fed and sent to school.  Champagne says “jail is the best place for her” - her mom finished high school while she was in jail, and she seems to be getting her life turned around.  Champagne feels that if her mom had not gone to prison, she could have been dead.  A heartfelt film with a very positive message, this is the best film in the box set.

The Talking Eggs (*********9/10):  An old Creole folk tale, narrated by Danny Glover, this is a poetic story about some magical eggs and a homeless woman.  The words used in the film are terrific, phrases like “the air was ablaze with colliding rainbows” seem to fit right in with the rest of the dialogue.  The message for children, while abstract, is a great one, and the story is compelling and charming.

It’s the first snow in the city in three years, and Selena is having a terrible day.  Her mom won’t let her go explore in the snow because she has chores to do at home.  She gets ketchup on her blouse, gets hit by a snowball, and accidentally trips an old woman.  She helps the old woman up, and offers to carry her groceries to her house.  It turns out the old woman’s “house” is beneath the train tracks - she is homeless.  The old woman invites Selena to stay for dinner, which turns out to be a magical event with music, delicious food, and a singing dancing dog - see?  More dancing animals.  The old woman gives Selena three eggs to take home with her, after the two have a long, transformative talk over dinner.

On the way home, the three eggs break.  But each one turns into something wonderful.  A music box, a flip-book of Selena dancing, and a pot-shaped brooch encrusted with diamonds and jewels.  Selena’s mom wants her to sell the diamonds, but she refuses.  Laying on a thick guilt trip, her mom convinces Selena’s brother Wade to go back to the old woman and steal her eggs.  Of course, Wade, in stealing the eggs, shows that he is not as good a person as his sister, and chaos ensues involving pea soup and a giant dove.  Everyone learns a valuable lesson, and we are all richer for having seen the film.

The Hunting Of The Snark (********8/10):  This is a nonsense film based on a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, a master of the nonsensical.  There is a ship full of strange characters - a bellman, a judge, a baker, a butcher, a beaver…the beaver is damn cute.  And of course, at one point he dances.  The butcher wants to kill the beaver.  I guess to cook him and eat him.  So the beaver is constantly hiding from the butcher.  The beaver is constantly sitting around and sewing, until the crew disembarks to hunt for a snark, which I guess is some kind of mythical winged creature that we never really see for real.  In the end, thanks to a shared fright, the beaver and butcher become best friends, and the movie ends…it’s weird, but has some serious imagination in its animation.

The Little Match Girl (********8/10):  Based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, but updated for today’s audiences.  It’s now 1999, on New Years’ Eve.  The little match girl’s family lives in an abandoned subway station, (although they seem to have nice shirts and slacks, and look pretty clean-cut and normal for a homeless family).  Angela makes money for the family by selling matches outside a theatre in Times Square.  (Frankly, I don’t know why, if they’re going to update the rest of the story, why not update the matches part as well?  Why not have her selling Molex watches or something more plausible than matches?)

It’s a freezing night, and on her way to Times Square Angela befriends a dog, whom she names Albert.  It’s a slow night for match-selling, so she and Albert huddle in an alley, still freezing.  Eventually, against her better judgement, she uses the merchandise to keep warm.  Each time she lights up a match, she has a vision - her aunt takes her away to a party, a jazz musician takes her away to a concert - but of course in the end the matches run out.  What was a pretty darn bleak fairy tale by Andersen is still bleak, but is given a slightly more heartwarming and happy ending here by Sporn.

The Red Shoes (*******7/10):  Again, a Hans Christian Andersen story, this one about two girls who forget their friendship and then regain it, all over a pair of read dancing shoes.  Lisa and Jenny are best friends, but when Lisa’s family wins the lottery, she moves away and begins to ignore and avoid Jenny.  When they both see the same pair of red dancing shoes at a performance of The Nutcracker, they both set out to get them.  Of course, Jenny is very poor and Lisa is (now) very rich, but money can’t buy these shoes, which are available to only one of them.  Eventually, the shoes bring the girls back together, and they reconnect and become friends once again.

The whole story is told through the eyes and the voice of the shoemaker in the old neighbourhood, Alphonse.  He has been friends with the families of both girls for a long time, he has seen Lisa and Jenny grow up, and he wants them to be friends again.  It is Alphonse who takes Jenny to the ballet for Christmas, where the shoes pop up.  Also of note in this particular short film is a pretty cool reggae and Caribbean soundtrack.

The Emperor’s New Clothes (*******7/10):  And Hans Christian Andersen again, in yet another fairly tale.  This time Regis Philbin appears, doing the voice of the emperor.  I assume everyone knows the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, and so too does Michael Sporn.  So he tries to do something brand new with it, and for the most part is succesful.  The film, once again, is a story-within-a-story, as a reporter interviews some locals to find out how the Big Festival went.  Of course, that was the festival where the emperor showed up without any clothes on.  The emperor, at this festival, was the Parade Marshall, you see.  Oh, you do?  I actually didn’t.  Parade Marshall?  What?  And after a while I realized that on average every third line was delivered in rhyme.  But the other two weren’t.  Which was odd as well.

The best part about this story, however, was the modern allegory.  Little references made it subtle at first - references to things like “earmarks”, and the tax money that was going to a war that no one understood.  A war that had been going on so long that no one remembered how it had started, or why.  The emperor circumvents the rules in the country’s constitution in order to obtain funds from the treasury to purchase his new clothes.  And the more the emperor appears to be a complete idiot, the more the yes-men and toadies around him feed his folly with their blanket acceptance of everything he does.  (To be fair, this movie was made before George Bush won the election in 2000, before 9/11 and the Iraq war.  But…prescient much?)

In the end though, The Emperor’s New Clothes is a fitting analogy to stuff like right-wing talk shows, for example.  If someone says you’re stupid if you don’t see the clothes, people will pretend to see the clothes just so they don’t appear stupid.  They don’t think enough to realize that actually “seeing” clothes on the emperor would make you pretty darn stupid in itself.  I think this analogy works - if you yell stuff loud enough, and ridicule people who don’t believe as you do, then eventually they will say they believe what you say (or, in some cases, actually end up believing it) just so you stop calling them stupid.  And the emperor is naked.

Nightingale (********8/10):  Back to the Hans Christian Andersen well.  Another story involving an emperor, only this time an oriental one.  A nightingale lives in the woods outside the emperor’s palace, singing in the trees.  The little bird achieves a certain amount of local fame for its beautiful song.  A little girl is friends with the nightingale, and apparently speaks Nightingale, beacuse she seems to be able to translate its words for the emperor’s men who set out to bring the bird back to the palace to sing for the Big Guy.  Once at the palace, the nightingale captivates the emperor with his song, and the emperor seeks to keep the bird around to sing for him.  But the bird won’t sing on command, and the emperor becomes frustrated.

Soon, another bird arrives at the palace, a wind-up jewel-encrusted bird that sings as well, and the emperor professes to like this one better.  Of course we know he doesn’t, and he is disappointed when the nightingale leaves.  But when the emperor falls gravely ill, the little girl brings the nightingale back to the palace to sing the emperor back into health.  More remarkable than the fact that a bird has such a lovely song, is probably the fact that just by singing, he can bring people back from death’s door.  And all is well in the kingdom.  Or…emperordom.  Whatever.

And that’s the twelve short films.  Some of them absolute classics, like Whitewash and Champagne, and others cute renditions of fairy tales, like The Red Shoes and Nightingale.  All in all, this is a great set to have if you’re an animation afficionado, a film fan, or if you want to get something for your kids that isn’t in the Pixar-Dreamworks-Disney mold.  A very worthwhile set.

Alliance Films releases the second DVD in the Unstable Fables series today, September 9th. The first one was a charming, fresh take on the three little pigs, called Three Pigs and a Baby. This one is a charming, fresh take on the tortoise and the hare, called Tortoise vs. Hare. It’s not quite as good as the first one, mostly because it’s kinda preachy for a kids’ program. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. Dozens of kids shows are preachy and irritating. I just expected better from Jim Henson studios on this one.

You see, it has been fifteen years since the tortoise and the hare had their big race. The one where the hare, miles in the lead, figured he had time to take a nap just a few yards from the finish line. And the tortoise won. The moral of this story has always been “slow and steady wins the race”. A moral that has always bugged me. Tell that to Usain Bolt. The moral should really be “fast and NOT crushingly stupid wins the race”. Now, 15 years later, the tortoise is a rich, successful lawyer and the hare is a sketchy, daredevil used-car salesman. And they are competing for the title of Worst Father In The World, as they push their respective children into an outdoor adventure survival race in order to one-up each other.

It’s still a charming and fresh take on a familiar fairy tale, there’s just too much of that cruel-father-gets-his-comeuppance stuff for my liking. But that’s a minor complaint. Despite the cheap animation, the animals are very expressive and have great characters, and the kids love it. That’s reason enough to pick up Tortoise vs. Hare today.

The new trend in kids’ movies is to take a concept from a classic adult film, dress it up with cutesy animated characters, and dumb it down for the kids who might buy the lunchbox. Barnyard is no exception.  I’m reviewing Barnyard here as a point of reference for a TV series that is coming out on Tuesday.

Animals can talk and walk on two legs, but of course they do so only when people aren’t looking. Otis is a cow who is left in charge of the Barnyard after his father is killed defending the other animals from coyotes. Of course, Otis just wants to party, doesn’t want to fill his father’s shoes, but comes to grips with his role by the end of the film and saves the day. Much like the thousands of kung-fu movies I’ve seen.

One problem I had with Barnyard is that they’re cows. But they’re male. They don’t have udders, so they MUST be bulls, but there are other bulls we see in passing with rings through their noses who seem to have nothing to do with the movie. Secondly, why is it up to cows (or bulls, if that’s what they really are) to defend the farm? Wouldn’t horses do a better job? I’m thinking Boxer in Animal Farm. And there ARE horses there as well. So what are they doing while the coyotes eat chickens?

Every animated movie must have several characters meant to be cute and funny, and I guess in Barnyard they’re supposed to be the mouse with the Mexican accent, the tiny baby chick who idolizes Otis, and the freaky nondescript animal who keeps bursting out of a box for some very unnecessary dancing scenes. But none of these characters is funny, they’re just cuddly and irritating.

Not that Barnyard is that bad. It has some decent moments, like a scene involving a bad apple neighbourhood kid and some cow-tipping, and a scene where the donkey keeps knocking the farmer unconscious. But overall, it’s a movie every adult has seen thirty or forty times, with not enough humour to keep the kids entertained throughout.

Be Kind Rewind is the kind of movie that could have gone one of two ways. Either very stupid and silly, like so much of Jack Black’s work, or a very clever and ingenious send-up of familiar movies. It turns out to be somewhere in the middle, but that’s a good thing. It comes out June 17th from Alliance Films, and it’s well worth a rental. Mos Def is a clerk at a video store owned by Danny Glover that still rents VHS tapes while the rest of the world has switched to DVD. Jack Black is his crazy friend who believes the government is spying on him. When Glover leaves Mos Def in charge of the video store for a week, Black recruits him to help sabotage the power plant in the area. Def (is that how you refer to rappers by their last name? Who knows.) Backs out at the last minute, but Black goes ahead with the sabotage, which is unsuccessful, but leaves him electrocuted and magnetized.

When the magnetized Jack Black enters the video store, he erases all the video tapes on the shelves, and the two friends decide to fix the problem by remaking all the movies in the place on their own, based on their suspect knowledge of the films themselves. Mia Farrow makes a terrific appearance as the store’s most loyal customer, wanting to rent Ghostbusters. This becomes the first movie redone by Black and Def, and after the 20-minute version becomes something of a hit in the neighbourhood, they start making others. Rush Hour 2, Robocop, The Lion King, Driving Miss Daisy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, When We Were Kings, King Kong, Carrie, Last Tango in Paris and Men In Black get “sweded”, a bizarre term dreamed up by the guys to explain the origin of these bizarre copies of familiar movies. Before long, the store is a neighbourhood sensation.

There is so much other stuff in the film that will be familiar to the hardcore film buff. Not just the hilarious versions of famous movies that are done by the two main characters, but also the land developers who want to condemn the store and tear it down, leading to the inevitable community protest and rally to save the building. The baddies from the copyright office who show up to destroy the tapes, since the movies have been made without permission. The references Farrow makes to horror movies and how she can’t handle them. And Danny Glover’s obsession with Fats Waller and how the store is actually Waller’s birthplace and as such an historical landmark that requires preserving. All of it taken in a sweet and respectful way that gives a tip of the hat to so many movies that have come before.

Be Kind Rewind is also so gleeful in making the type of movie it sends up that it shows a great spirit in disregarding the problems that would be obvious to most viewers. Even with the poor quality of the films these two make, they would need more money than they obviously have just to make their re-shoots. If Jack Black is still magnetized to the point where he would have erased every tape in the store, he would also be erasing the tapes they make in the video camera. And Danny Glover never seems to have any kind of plan on how to actually save his store. But all this is terrific, because the gaps in logic are merely a part of the experience of the movie itself, a movie that ends up being almost as good, and in some cases (Rush Hour 2) even better than the films to which it pays homage.

Jack Black is his usual comically insane self, and Mos Def is superb as his buddy, whose relationships with Black and Glover create a more complex character than we expect to see in a film such as this. Also terrific in supporting roles are Glover as the blindly stubborn and slightly deluded old man, Mia Farrow as the sweet older woman around the corner, and Melonie Diaz as Alma, the girl who joins the movie making process when they need someone to make out with Jack Black. (The scene where they recruit her to star in their films is one of the highlights of this movie.) Add all these components together, and you get a sweet, clever, and wonderful movie by Michel Gondry, a man who clearly loves movies the way so many of the rest of us do.