| Monday, July 1, 2002 |
09:57 - The Products Speak for Themselves
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2002/06/000046.html
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Glenn Reynolds and Brian Carnell take turns harshing on the Hey, Arnold! movie and regretting having been forced to sit through it. Evidently it's trite, cheap, and has no real bearing on the show it comes from-- which, I admit, I haven't seen (the closest I'm willing to come to having rugrats of any kind in my house, with apologies to Lileks, is watching Baby Blues on Adult Swim).
Reynolds also disses the plot, which was one long anti-gentrification screed. But more than just the plot, the movie lacked completely the quirky atmosphere that makes the television show so much fun. There is a lot of ambiguity in the characters and situations in the show (which is one of its strengths -- it avoids the moral platitudes and mini-lectures that adults always want to insert into kids' shows), so it was weird seeing this simplistic black-and-white morality tale. Much of the time the movie looked like what Hey, Arnold! might be if the idiots responsible for Fern Gully took over the show.
Funny-- that's exactly the impression I got of the movie from the trailers. I remember immediately thinking, "These anti-corporate 'Oh, no, save the neighborhood from the evil black-suited corporate capitalists' angsty hippie storylines are sort of anachronistic these days, aren't they?" I mean, come on-- here we are trying to explain to the anti-globalization people why they're such morons for wanting to destroy McDonald's and the Gap and convince everybody to grow their own food and weave their own clothes, presumably because such things are eeeeevil-- and where does sentiment come from? Movies like Hey, Arnold!, it seems to me. This kind of story doesn't tell us anything new. It's just more yammering away on the same old note, one that has been ringing hollow since the days of Wayne's World. And especially so these past eight months.
Meanwhile, though, where I was seeing this trailer over and over-- and being thankful that I wasn't seeing the movie itself-- was in front of Lilo & Stitch, which I think is simply marvelous. Now, much as I know I should be boycotting Disney as a truly evil empire with aspirations that I can't condone, there is no way for me to deny that they make a superior product. When they decide to do break away from their money-making formula, they can produce some of the best stuff ever seen on this planet-- they still attract the very best creative people in the industry, and when you put all those people together in a building, there's a magic that gets produced that no amount of corporate greed or agenda can quell. Whereas Microsoft seems incapable of doing anything truly excellent, Disney keeps proving over and over again that they deserve every inch of their lead. (It's their choices that prove the quality of the company, though, not their capabilities-- to paraphrase Dumbledore.)
There is so much good about Lilo & Stitch that I won't bother listing more than three, at the risk of leaving out a whole pile of stuff that you're better off just experiencing in the theater.
- Stitch's character design is some of the best, most original work I've seen in years. Not just his visual structure, either-- his movement and his characterization. It's just brilliant. It's so complex that there's a ton of stuff you don't even get to see fleshed out, and that's the mark of greatness.
- Lilo, as a character, pulls off the impossible: a kid that I find cute and even appealing. She's precocious, but not in that Calvin or Bart Simpson or South Park or Home Movies kind of way-- you know, where the kids are just miniature adults, dealing with the same issues as the adults do and just as astutely. That kind of thing is good for laughs, but it's getting a bit trite, methinks. But that's because it's so much harder to do what they've done with Lilo: she's nuts, feeding the fish that controls the weather, taking pictures of fat tourists, and making her astute observations about raw and visceral emotions-- love and family-- that is absent from the sarcastic and cynical dishing that we usually see from the kids-smarter-than-the-adults shows. Again, brilliant.
- The interaction between Lilo and Nani-- particularly during that fight through the house that they have early in the movie-- is some of the most realistic human interaction that I have ever seen animated. Seriously. It makes the mouth hang open at how far this stuff has come from the metaphorical shorthand of fairy-tale animation. Maybe we'll one day experience a return to the traditional elision of stark realism in human characterization, but I for one think what we have today is outstanding.
First The Emperor's New Groove, and now this. And from the way things are going, this time Disney might actually have a box-office and merchandising success on their hands, something they haven't been able to do with a non-Pixar movie since The Lion King. And they so desperately need such a success to keep them from being evil. If this encourages them to keep making ground-breaking movies, where the big-budget effects take a backseat to the writing and the characterizations (in an extension of what's been so successful lately with Cartoon Networks' gold shows), like NASA's shoestring projects that got so much done for so little money before they imploded under quality shortcuts-- I'm all for it. As long as they don't end up like NASA.
It's easy to hate Microsoft, isn't it? Because everybody hates Windows. But it's just so damned hard to hate things like Lilo & Stitch.
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