Disney animated features: The rappel à l'ordre (1989-1994)

the famous katzenberg letter, he begins to discuss rescuers down under some starting on pg 15

Uh, saw the 4 big ones. A friend had Beauty & The Beast on laserdisc, so we watched that a whole bunch of times until he got TERMINATOR 2 and omg bye-bye stupid foofy wannabeast. Gaston song is amazing though! Remember seeing a clip from The Little Mermaid at some sort of Apple conference thing where they were showing off this amazing new thing QUICKTIME and they had the Under the Sea scene shown at the size of a postage stamp. No idea why I was there. Same presentation showed off the amazing NEWTON!

Actually, this is the era I've seen the most of, since the Norwegian TV channel didn't show Disney movies when I was a kid and the video stores didn't have 'em either. I do recall seeing Pinocchio at a birthday party, but that's about it for the earlier movies. Great big pop cultural gap, that.

Anyhoo, here's some important additional data to aid you in your selection:

Little Mermaid = “Homer, that’s your solution to everything, to move under the sea"

The Lion King = “The circle of KNIFE”

Beauty & The Beast = "Like my loafers / Former gophers / it was that, or skin my chauffeurs / But a greyhound fur tuxedo would be best"

The only thing I remember about the Rescuers sequel aside from John Candy was Ebert's outrage over the racial coding of the villain.

xpost

The Little Mermaid definitely inspired the best Simpsons joke, yes.

i voted beauty + the beast and i'm curious if detractors (particularly doc casino) feel the same way about the original source material as they do about the film? i ask bc fairy tales in general contain all kinds of dodgy stuff

― Mordy , Wednesday, March 12, 2014 6:46 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haven't read the fairy tale in ages but the plot outline to me seems like basically the same idea and presumably it was very 'functional' in medieval German villages: something for mother (or dad) to tell kids to explain why daddy seems to fly into violent rages, smash things, make mommy cry - and how he really is a great man and father underneath, so don't worry if the fellow we set you up to marry seems to do those same things. So... why make a movie of this in 1991, for children, again?

Bookmarking the Katzenberg letter for later viewing...

aladdin takes this because it's great and the sega game was also great

i never played the games to the lion king, littlest mermaid or beauty and the beast but they're all pretty great too tbh

special notice to the lino king for being the only disney movie where the released songs were actually better performed than the ones in the movie itself

re: B&TB - Ha, wow, shows how much I know - it's a French fairy tale, not German! Hmm. Maybe I should read more of the plot. Forgot that it has more of a class narrative to it.

the lino king

I can't remember the specifics of the Disney movie but in the fairy tale the Beast isn't angry or violent. Quite the opposite

aladdin is so fucking shit

it's like I rubbed a lamp and a galaxy of shit came out stank of shit and didn't shut up

xpost: eh, the basic idea of 'beauty and the beast' is very old and has a lot of equivalents in greek, norse, arthurian et al mythology. basically all of the stuff that ppl are objecting to (the beast's abusiveness) was added for the film and wasn't really a point in any of the original stories.

did u see aladdin wins i think if you see the disney one it's actually great just check

not falling for that one again

dammit

i just need to hustle three more rentals and i get a free swatch with robin williams voiced alarm

Yeah, based on Wiki y'all are right, the fairy tale really is a different beast altogether. Not sure I'd care for that movie much either, mind you, but for different reasons.

the voyage through the flooded town in ponyo is one of my favorite kid-adventure things ever. boats tied to the houses floating above them like balloons. the dark journey into the canopy. your hometown made strange.

many xps.

I thought B&TB was about preparing young wives for dealing with their prospective husbands' bestial sexual urges

xxxxp

how very ilxy

Like "here's like "here's a guy who's a sweet gentleman, btw he has huge hairy balls and is into anal, learn to deal with it"

xp

the cartoon "JEM" did a version of B&TB from which Disney borrowed imo

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v170555943KNX7643

Everything was pseudo-downhill after that for them, no?

Hard to choose among these, but leaning towards Beauty and the Beast for reasons other people have already mentioned:
- The Gaston song. Sometimes when I make eggs the line 'and now that I'm grown I eat five dozen eggs so I'm roughly the size of a barge' plays in my head.
- It spawned one of the greatest Simpsons parodies ever.
- It has a sort of darkness that most modern Disney films don't.
- Belle is a top notch Disney woman (hesitating to use the phrase 'princess') (she's weird and bookish and ignores the advances of men who aren't good enough for her. A+)

I have fond memories of Aladdin and the Lion King too (and their respective Sega Genesis games, as someone else mentioned, even though the levels didn't really have anything to do with the movie storylines half the time); Little Mermaid is good fun.

Does anyone else remember in the mid-90s when there was a thing around how the priest in the Little Mermaid gets a boner and the leaves in the Lion King spelled out 'sex' and the Genie told Aladdin to take off his clothes (or something)?

the cartoon "JEM" did a version of B&TB from which Disney borrowed imo

truly outrageous!

http://www.animatedbuzz.com/WB/images/coverart01.jpg

Ned upthread, I'm pretty sure that Mickey Mouse short was paired with a rerelease of the original Rescuers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcuI6K9daIw

'rescuers down under' was actually paired with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_and_the_Pauper_(1990_film)

haven't seen either since, but fondly remember seeing both of these with my family over christmas that year.

http://www.lancaster.gov.uk/Images/LordAshton1.jpg

I re-watched Aladdin recently, and it was fine. I was sort of weirded out by just how opulent the palace is, though. I mean, princes and princesses, that's par for the course, but the palace is just dwarfing Agrabah, and the sultan must really really opress the people for that to work. Also, Jafar is apparantly authorised to execute people without telling the sultan - even though it's just for stealing bread. Real dictatorship going on, there.

the sultan is p much unfit for rule and jafar seems to be in control of the state; the only scheming he apparently has to do anymore is for control of the succession.

can't be long till we get a broadway musical where jafar is secretly the good guy trying to outwit the evil genie and his gullible patsy aladdin.

haa, it would be cool if the movie ended with Aladdin releasing the genie and Jafar being like noooooo stoooooop and then Robin Williams destroys the world like the genie in Quest for Glory II:

http://home.comcast.net/~ervind/qg2iblis.png

rewatched mermaid + beast. reddening otm abt ariel being an asshole; it's hilarious. she's a real lil meangirl to flounder. a bad influence. "you can stay here and watch for sharks." in comparison honestly the viceless belle's kinda sterile; i prefer my disney princesses hellions. also tops: the bullshitting anthropologist seagull; ariel's expression of delight staring at her new toes; her always-in-motion hair; octopus divine. but the prince is worthless, as is his whole human entourage (boring dog, cypher valet) with the exceptions i guess of the demented chef and the priest with a boner.

beauty and the beast i'd never seen in full i now realize. i dunno, it was pretty stunning. the french peasant village and surrounding wolf-infested forest: the movie's set in platonic fairy tale country like nothing since sleeping beauty, and that country is so gorgeous and populated. i loved belle's horse--hugely expressive without a single cutesy reaction shot--and some of the beast's dumb-boy postures, like this one:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v87/Inuxx/vlcsnap-00002_zpsbec5e46f.png

and then there is gaston, hands down the best villain in this lot imo: a human-sized villain, a local asshole, instead of a scheming witch or sorcerer or regicide. (unlike ursula or jafar, he does not Turn Really Big for the boss fight.) and yet his motive is vanity--the motive of the o.g. wicked queen. he's a Funny Villain but his buffoonishness isn't separate from his menace; he's always expressing both. (i love when he invites belle on a date to the tavern "to look at my trophies"--then at the end wants the beast as a trophy.) in fact there is lots of unsettling laughter inthis movie: the scene where gaston's cackling lickspittle humiliates belle's father before the entire town is one of the rougher things in this poll. (this scene also featured the bony and sinister asylum director, a v polished lil bit part).

whole thing does indeed seem to be about how your job as a girl is to adopt and socialize violent men with anger issues in exchange for protection from wolves and bores. but at least this Problem is part of the story, part of the friction of the adaptation, instead of just a thoughtless ambience like aladdin's bland racism. really tho i am just making excuses because the rainy balcony climax got me all involved. as patriarchal bodice-rippers go a pretty good one.

the ballroom scene now has a fatal playstation vibe tho. like they've walked onto the holodeck.

you prefer your Disney princesses as tops.

Maybe I was a little too old for most of them; the difference between seeing something at 5 and seeing it at 8 is probably quite large

yeah, I hadn't really thought about it but it seems that B&TB is a kind of cut-off point for me, I enjoyed Aladdin and Lion King back then but I don't have the same attachment to them.

B&TB was my favourite but the unpleasantness of Belle and Beast's relationship does taint it, yeah. I'd maybe have preferred it if it was just Belle hanging around the village, humiliating Gaston every so often, then heading off to Paris for an exciting cosmopolitan life. The Rescuers Down Under is one that I have probably an inappropriate amount of affection for as I was just the right age to watch the video a million times, but now I don't even particularly remember the plot. Kid goes missing, scary hunter dude (voiced by George C. Scott!), giant golden eagle (nice flying scenes iirc), somethingsomethingsomething.

Ducktales movie is alright but I may throw it a vote anyway, pretend I'm voting for the TV series and that classic NES game.

There's no way I could put generic jock Gaston over Scar or even Jafar for that matter, who works a very similar languid but less gratuitous sarcasm but lacks the Jeremy Irons factor and degrees of menace. Gaston ain't really working the fear factor like the others either because the focus of our trepidation for most of the film is supposed to be the Beast. Not that a villain has to be scary to be effective but it does rob him of a dimension that has helped make some of the others iconic. As a kid I was legit terrified by some of em but Gaston didn't really register as much more than standard dickhead.

Plus some of Irons' delivery is simply peerless I mean shit like this?
http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6fu60awnR1rwcc6bo1_500.gif
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view7/2947554/long-live-the-king-o.gif
Can't have seen the films in close to a decade but I know exactly what it sounds like.

In fact Scar wins just for, "I know that your powers of retention are as wet as a warthog's backside."

Speaking of the funnies, I'd go James Woods' Hades. Vaguely remember loving Prince John as a kid because he mirrored my earlobe tug-thumb suck, pacifier combo.

ok is this the worst piece of movie writing ever?

you prefer your Disney princesses as tops.

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, March 15, 2014 4:29 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_li4g6obGup1qghkx5o1_r4_400.gif

the irons inflection i always think of is "but when it comes to brute strength... i'm afraid i'm at the shallow end of the gene pool."

You have nooooo idea

^^^

when gaston first realizes that belle has a thing for the beast there's a shot of him wearing an expression of such shocked disgust that when he began saying "sheeeeeeeee's as crazy as her old man!" i powerloled cuz it sounded for a moment like he was headed for "jeeeeeeeeeesus CHRIST!"

the other highlight from TLK is 'well stttthhlippery as your mind may be"

when he began saying "sheeeeeeeee's as crazy as her old man!"

http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsC/2615-9760.gif

"Goes to show it's in da genes!"

And go cock-a-doodle-doo.

As a kid I was legit terrified by some of em

ursula and her fuckin worm garden or whatever the hell that was scared the christ out of me when i was a kid... more than any other disney thing ever, easily

the lion king came out when i was 8 and me and my dad saw it together in the theater. i mean how could it not be my favorite... when (spoiler) mufasa freakin dies... thats some real shit man.

i havent seen any of these since i was a kid but i did watch the opening scene of TLK on youtube recently and i wont lie it still gave me chills. you can just coast after an opening that good. its become part of Disney Lore that it was actually made by the b-team and they didnt have high expectations for it, pocahontas was supposed to be their next huge hit

Y'all are making a good case for Scar in terms of Shakespearean menace and presence. Kind of feeling dlh on Gaston though, as with Cruella - something great about the ones that just feel like outsize versions of real-life assholes you've hated.

Just checked out some clips of the DuckTales movie, was disappointed to realize the animation wasn't that much better than the TV show. As a kid I remember it being a major step up. Of course, the TV show already looked damn good for a daily cartoon at the time.