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I’m absolutely positively NOT the audience for animated movies. I loved cartoons as a kid (I remember asking a teacher why it was so much easier to wake up on Saturday mornings when cartoons are on than it is to wake up for school), but that love faded with puberty and the discovery of real live girls with real live girl parts. Not to disparage an art form, but to me animated movies are just cartoons and they’re still made for kids with far too few exceptions. On the other hand, I love “Finding Nemo,” so sometimes they do work for me.
“Frozen” is pretty much a steaming pile of cow patty. Like women I’ve dated, It’s pretty with no substance. It’s totally Disney, so Disney it made me want to vomit. All the classic Disney story ingredients are here: princes and princesses and queens and handsome lads on horses, and of course a goofy character for comic relief, in this case a talking snowman (who is, admittedly, pretty funny). I give the movie a 1.5 out of four.
NOT that it has no value. It is, I can see, an amazing production. Start with the music. Broadway songwriters are now whores to Disney; the music in this film, though saccharine, is clearly first rate (and apparently catchy, because there are “Frozen” Sing-Along screenings. Man, if they’d handed me a lyric sheet when I’d walked into this thing, I’d have walked right out again.) I did like some of the CGI effects. I mean animated visuals. I mean CGI effects. I mean animated visuals. I mean… It’s getting hard to tell the live action movies from the cartoons anymore, but that’s a topic for another blog. “Frozen” is very good at accomplishing what it sets out to be. It shows you all the things you expect from a classic sweeping Disney animated feature. It’s all cute and gooey.
But it’s hard to know who the movie is supposed to be for. It’s too trite for adults, and not modern or exciting enough for kids. Who’s the audience for this thing? Ah, that’s right; parents who want their kids to love it. ApPARENTly there are a lot of them, this thing has made close to four hundred million dollars and is still going strong. Still, it has an uneven mix of qualities; the story is unfocused, the look amazing, the elements trite and uninspired, the singers and songs top-notch, the elements unoriginal, the story largely predictable, and the humor dropped in like a necessary ingredient in the Disney mold. Sadly, it will probably win the Oscar for Best Animated Movie on Sunday.
Cut to: “The Wind Rises.” This one’s from Japan and has English overdubs. I expected there’d be English subtitles, but then I realized, why NOT overdubs? It’s a cartoon, ANY language will match the lip movements.
This is more like it. I don’t know much about the history this movie covers - the hero is a Japanese airplane designer and engineer and shows us his life before and during WWII - but it was nice to see an animated movie with a base in real life and recent history. It’s definitely made for an older sensibility and I like seeing animation used in a more mature way. I’s very poetic, a little slow moving, but if you settle into it you’ll enjoy its grace. Here’s a bit about the director and animator Hayao Miyazaki from Wikipedia: “Miyazaki's films often contain recurrent themes, like humanity's relationship with nature and technology, pro-feminism, and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic. The protagonists of his films are often strong, independent girls or young women. While two of his films, The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, involve traditional villains, his other films like Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke present morally ambiguous antagonists with redeeming qualities. He co-wrote films The Secret World of Arrietty, released in July 2010 in Japan and February 2012 in the United States; and From Up on Poppy Hill release in July 2011 in Japan and March 2013 in the United States. Miyazaki's newest film The Wind Rises was released on July 20, 2013 and is planned for an international release. Miyazaki announced on September 1, 2013 that this will be his final feature-length film.”
Not being a big fan of animation I’d never heard of Miyazaki, but my friend Erik had and he joined us for this one. We all liked it. I also like aviation, especially the planes of the pre-jet era, so it was nice to see a film about someone who was passionate about planes. It makes sense that this is an animated movie, it’d be a very expensive live action film, maybe prohibitively so. The film handles Japan during WWII in an interesting way. You hear the engineer characters say several times how disappointing it is their beautiful creations will be used in war, and you see the main character lament at the end how none of his most accomplished planes ever made it back from a mission. You do see brief scenes of fighting and a field of wrecked Japanese planes, but the war isn’t what this movie is about and not much attention is paid to it. It’s really a film that celebrates the artistry of engineers and their creativity. You’ll recognize the planes Jiro Horikoshi designs, iconic Japanese fighters of WWII, and will develop a deeper appreciation for their graceful aesthetic. I like how the film shows you how even an “enemy” nation has good, creative and accomplished people.
The movie has several recognizable voices for the English version including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the lead character Jiro Horikoshi, John Krasinski, Martin Short, Werner Herzog, William H. Macy, Mandy Patinkin, Stanley Tucci and Elijah Wood among others. The original voices were Japanese actors and I’m not sure how they got so many heavyweights for the English release.
The movie is poetic and graceful and if a little slow, it’s refreshing to see a mature approach taken with an animated movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(2013_film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises
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