Animation Defenestration: The one with a cat, a robot and an alien that's animated

 

Title: Lily CAT

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Knockoff/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

I’m back with another installment of this feature, and it takes me to what I really meant to start with, 1980s animation. I have commented previously, especially in my review of Rock And Rule, that the 1980s tends to get overshadowed by the psychedelic weirdness of the 1960s and ‘70s. Yet, “psychedelic” animation still had the underlying predictability of a real trend (one which can in fact be traced well before 1950), and the same can be said of “adult” animation from the 1990s onward. By comparison, the ‘80s were a transitional period where experimentation was the rule more than the exception, with all the strange dead ends that go with it. And if one movie embodies all the good, bad and ugly of the decade, it’s the semi-obscure little offering under consideration here. I present Lily CAT, a vanguard of the anime invasion, and like many forerunners, it’s just weird.

Our story begins with a ship travelling through space with a crew of stock characters and grab-bag supporting roles. We learn that they have volunteered to travel on a 40-year round trip spent in suspended animation. Among them are a crusty captain now centuries old, a sympathetic medical student, a generic damsel who brought her cat along for the ride, and a tough-guy type who doesn’t seem to care whether he has a gun. The captain receives a transmission warning that there are two impostors in their midst, presumed to be criminals trying to outlive their pursuers, but nobody knows who. Meanwhile, the ship has taken on a strange alien organism that quickly begins feeding on the cast. As the creature grows, the survivors must put aside their differences to survive. But the greatest threat may be a robot sent to replace them!

Lily CAT was a Japanese animated film made by Studio Pierrot, with anime veteran Hisayuki Toriumi credited as director. The film is believed to have been based on both Alien and Aliens, with further apparent influence from the 1982 version of The Thing. The original Japanese film was reportedly 80 minutes long, while an English-language version was cut down to 67 minutes. The western/ English version was one of many “dubs” by Carl Macek for Streamline Pictures,  with voice acting by Mike Reynolds, Bob Bergen and The Ghost In The Shell’s Tom Wyner. Information on the contemporary release and distribution of either version is extremely limited at the time of this writing, though the English version has been dated to 1994. The 67-minute/ dubbed version is currently available digitally, including free streaming on several platforms. Availability of the Japanese version cannot be easily confirmed.

For my experiences, I first caught wind of this one while going through Alien knockoffs and runnerups for Space 1979 (see.. Inseminoid?). I gave it a viewing early on and came back to it several times thereafter, but never found it suitable for my purposes. Among other things, I wasn’t satisfied connection that it owed that much to Alien, outside of a shared body of concepts that could easily be traced to older sources. It got me pondering further whether Japanese sci fi and animation have a fundamentally different status than their American counterparts. There was certainly never anything like the “moral guardian” outrages that turned western animation into a ghetto. While we now know the kaiju genre ended up in a comparable kiddie-fare rut, it at least remained by all indications something the “mainstream” paid attention to. What this movie offers first and foremost is a glimpse of what might have been if it hadn’t taken hits like Star Wars and Alien for a genre to be taken seriously. The answer, it turns out, is movies that could be competent without striving to be that good.

At this point, we can go to the pros/ cons format. Most of the good points come out just in the concept work. To me personally, the most impressive element is the ship, which is a far too rare example of a vessel that looks “cool” while still making sense. Particularly noteworthy is the absence of the pseudorealistic convolutions of the Star Wars fleet. Also impressive is the development of the suspended-animation concept and its implications for individuals and society, played out particularly in a genuinely moving monologue from the captain. In this respect, the movie builds on Aliens as much as Alien, and after the many odd coincidences I have uncovered with “runnerups”, I’m willing to grant reasonable doubt whether the story was conceived independently. Finally, there is the surreal and absolutely terrifying monster, which we really only see a few times. What I find most striking is that, for all the talk about this being a knockoff, it is in fact quite distinct and to my instincts definitely Japanese in look and feel. It’s enough to make me wonder if this is another case of Japan not so much ripping off the west as taking back what was theirs in the first place.

The cons, on the other hand, inevitably entangle with the edited dub and the problematic treatment of Japanese animation in general. Of course, it’s very regrettable that the Japanese version isn’t available for comparison, and I won’t presume to judgement on its creators. At a certain point, however, a reviewer has to work with what we have, and I simply can’t convince myself that 13 more minutes would make the difference between what’s here and a masterpiece that might have been. The cracks definitely show in the story, which conspicuously draws out the cops-and-robbers subplot for no good reason only to wrap it up with pointless melodrama. (And why bring handcuffs on a starship, but not your own gun?) I find the faults even more glaring in the animation itself. As already noted, the animators are top-notch at portraying machines and creatures, but the human characters and for that matter the cat fall into “uncanny valley” territory well before there was CGI to blame. At best, they look pleasantly bland; at worst, they are awkward and unaccountably unnatural, particularly the one or two who are supposed to be neither “white” nor Asian. In light of this, I can’t avoid the suspicion that the “dub” might actually be an improvement, particularly with Reynolds’ voice work factored in.

After all that, I’m genuinely stumped for the “one scene”. I’m going with the opening, which starts with the luminous silhouette of the cat. We then jump to a view of a space station and the departing starship, which looks like nothing so much as skyscraper turned sideways. We then move to the interior, where we meet the characters, some of them interesting. The big foreshadowing is when a lady introduced as the daughter of an executive reveals that she brought her cat along. And this is a problem I keep niggling with. From what we learn later, the cat could already be a synthetic replacement, perhaps orchestrated by her family without her knowledge. But then other intervening scenes imply that the cat starts as an animal real enough to be absorbed by the creature. The real question is, why was it decided to present the cat as a central figure in the first place? Of course, we had Jonesy in Alien, but this is like retitling the movie The Cat, and it’s still a bait-and-switch for what’s really a limited element of the story. This is one thing I will allow might have made more sense in the original cut, but I’m stretching goodwill in far too many areas already.

In closing, the one thing I have left to say is that this is a movie I probably would have given a better rating if I had reviewed it sooner.  I will further concede that this is a case of putting a film to more scrutiny than it was intended to take. Even in the 1990s, most people experienced movies as a trip to the theater or a weekend video rental. Anime was subject to an even lower bar, more likely to be encountered from an airing on TV than in a home-video format you could scrutinize at leisure. With all these things factored in, I still can’t justify giving this film a better rating than ones I was already hard on, particularly Wizards. My usual caveat remains that even 1 of 4 in the ratings scale I use here is a film worth watching. But what it’s most noteworthy as is a movie that laid the way for much better things.

Futures Past: Retro-Future buildings

 

For this month, I'm going with a reduced lineup to make time for other things. In the process, I decided it was time for something new. Through my life, my strongest influences have been ridiculously outdated sci fi, and as I've tried to return to writing after my dark years, I have increasingly looked at the intentionally "retro", as seen with my first and much more recent second installments of Percy the robot cop. In the process, I finally found an opportunity to delve into the motherlode of retro kitsch, the 1964 World's Fair and its centerpiece, Futurama 2. I also indulged very heavily in autoshape concept drawings, which have proved to be a convenient way to go through what has always been a big part of my creative process. To dive right in, here's one of my concepts and a World's Fair design I based it on directly.

This is a design I called the Aster, and I spent a good deal of time trying to develop it into a major setting before the whole project bogged down. When I thought to try restarting things, I decided to keep the Aster in a more limited role. I also decided to make it two towers as shown in the original, something I took a while to figure out for sure. I also decided on a design that fit better with what I had in mind, which was an arcology-style skyscraper (a concept that fascinated me before I knew the name or full history) with interconnected secondary buildings. Here's my main sketch; for scale, the squares are supposed to be 20 meters on a side. Just how tall it would be is still in flux, but something like 200 to 300 stories. An incidental idea I settled on is that the future city-state government would require all living units to have a window and a minimum of 24 square meters living space (small but not quite the low end for existing housing). Invariably, this meant a bunch of long, skinny apartments with the window filling one end, and undoubtedly a much higher price for anything on a corner.

What I had wanted all along was something huge enough to dwarf everything else, close to but not quite over a mile high. (By comparison, half a mile/ 800m is still the final frontier for anything filled out with practical, occupied interior space.) I settled on 1.44 km, and for a very long time, I held with the idea of something that would be pretty "fat", not more than 1/10th as wide as it was high. However, I finally decided something with a compact profile was in order. I quickly came up with a design that would fit within the footprint of existing buildings but still scale to the height I planned without going past 1/24 for the height and width. Here's the design I came up with, scaled at 60 to 70 meters wide minus the bits on the sides.

Once I came back to this, I quickly decided what I needed was some intermediate structures. Meanwhile, I came across something to awesomely impractical to pass up. It's called the National Commercial Bank headquarters, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, apparently designed for the express purpose of having space for light aircraft to fly through, which of course fitted what I wanted for the story.

Here's a couple shots I took at scaling this up while keeping it practical, "only" 50-100 stories. The first is a main tower alone, the second is envisioned including a "base" and a wider complex with a bunched of tiered courtyards, parking lots and so forth.

Finally, I had had an idea all along for more spread-out housing, and it was the design most directly based on the source material. I call this the "Stacker", and I picture it as a condominium-style development with two or three levels, maybe 30-50 meters wide. This time, I could at least assume a ground-level entrance, with perhaps a pool or gym in the middle.

And with that, I'm done for now. For an extra, here's a video of the exhibit being assembled, including the best image I have found of the "Aster" towers. I still don't know how far I will go with this, but I at least want to get far enough to go through the material I already have (including an adventure of the Evil Possum). That's all for now, more to come!

The Revenant Review Extras: The one where sound wakes the dead

 

Title: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue

What Year?: 1974

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

With this review, I’m officially into overtime with this feature, and I’m also filling a time out from other projects. My overarching rationale has been that what I meant as the “bonus” reviews are already up, particularly my do-overs of the original Revenant Review. In the process, I hope to cover a few loose ends. I’m starting with the one that I gave the most thought to in the first run, a prominent if somewhat neglected zombie movie I never quite made up my mind about. With that, I introduce Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, a very British offering that just missed the 1970s zombie waves, and still doesn’t quite fit in.

Our story begins with a woman who accidentally strands a cyclist on the way to visit a family member. He ends up coming along for the ride, and on the way, they begin to encounter strange, silent lurkers who watch and stalk. The pair soon find themselves under official suspicion when the lady’s in-law is killed by one of the attackers. Meanwhile, the suspicious proto-hipster discovers a sonic machine in use to destroy pests. As the weirdos close in and claim more victims, he realizes that these are undead, somehow brought to life by the “radiation” from the machine. Their only chance is to destroy the machine, but first, he must free the lady from an infested hospital, and the cops still have a dimmer view of him than the undead!

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was an independent horror film directed by Jorge Grau. While the film was set in England, the production was a multinational collaboration, filmed mainly in Italy with additional shooting on location in Manchester and other locations in England. The film starred Spanish actress Cristina Galbo and Italian Ray Lovelock as George, with American character actor Arthur Kennedy as the otherwise unnamed inspector. The film was first released in Spain in 1974 and in the US the following year under the alternate title Don’t Open The Window. It was reportedly shown as a double bill with The Last House On The Left. In home video releases, it has been known either by its given title or as The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, the title used for its UK release. It was released on DVD in 2000 by Anchor Bay and in 2005 by Blue Underground. In 2019, it was released on Blu Ray by Synapse (see… The Deadly Spawn?). It has been released for digital rental, but is not currently available on US streaming platforms.

For my experiences, my strongest recollection is that I once watched this as a digital rental on a ride to work. (Not the worst thing I ever selected, see The Cemetery Man…) I’m not sure if that would have been my first viewing, but it made a good enough impression to keep this one on my good side. I’ve watched it a few times since, but I didn’t get to it in the course of this feature until I did a sweep of my most frequented second-hand store for titles I didn’t already have and found only this. I skipped over it in my countdown, but still felt that this was due for a rematch sooner or later. I watched it when I didn’t have anything else planned, within the normal time frame for a review, and what I quickly realized is that this is a movie with far more problems than people usually remember.

The two things front and center here are the wonky concept and the possibly more awkward casting. The pseudoscientific “explanation” is quite possibly the most brazenly preposterous on record, to the point that it would be convenient to disregard it. There is at least enough further humor to take the outlandish machine and its posited capabilities as tongue-in-cheek. What gets more awkward is the performances of the cast, who aren’t bad by any means but seem out to one-up each other at being more English than the actual English. Galbo stays with a somewhat generic accent that mostly emphasizes her passive damsel role. Lovelock is exaggerated but tolerable, playing the cheeky hippie to the hilt. Kennedy, however, just sounds like he’s trying to play Sean Connery drunk.

That brings us to the undead themselves, which go a long way toward making up for the movie’s considerable flaws. For the most part, they’re even more low-tech than Night of the Living Dead, set apart by their unsettling red eyes. They clearly demonstrate the ability to use tools and weapons, and for once, they are either timid or patient enough to wait to attack until they have a good chance of victory. Their finest hour is when they trap the protagonists in a crypt under a church, dispatching a luckless policeman in process. In the most curious moment, one of them reanimates several more corpses with its own blood, an unexplained anomaly that could have worked much better if the silliness with the machine had been left out entirely. What gets odd is that they remain oddly reserved even in victory, looking almost apologetic and very British as they munch on their victims. As an incidental result, the viewer will probably see less than there is on-screen.

What truly holds the movie back, however, isn’t the restraint but an overreaching ambition. This is a movie that clearly sets out to match or top the sharp political satire of Romero, as shown by this point not only in Night of the Living Dead but also The Crazies.  The painfully obvious problem is that the filmmakers fail to show any grasp of what made Romero effective (see Zombi/ Dawn of the Dead). Apart from anything else, Romero’s characters aren’t “dumb”, and usually, they aren’t willfully “evil” either. Here, on the other hand, every authority figure is rendered with less nuance and depth than a Soviet political cartoon, smugly oblivious at best and irrationally and pointlessly mean at worst. Then the real elephant not in the room is the racial angle, something Romero repeatedly dealt with powerfully without ever once having it mentioned explicitly. In this movie, everyone we’re supposed to root for is not only white but young and attractive in the bargain, missing an opportunity if not the entire point.

With all that out of the way, there’s still the “one scene”, and I’m going with a brief sequence that’s illogical and inexplicable even for this movie. Around the 40-minute mark, George is visiting a hospital where he gets in a conversation with a doctor about a futuristic-looking coffin. Suddenly, they’re interrupted by an injured nurse who cries that she has been maimed. George follows the doctor and finds the culprit… a baby. As in, an actual infant, still bloodstained. Pricelessly, the doctor merely remarks, “It’s happened again,” while the baby squirms inscrutably. Of course, it’s yet another effect of the machine, though it takes whatever George is self-medicating with to make a connection. Of course, this is vastly more intriguing than the undead, and of course, it ought to get the attention of the authorities much faster than a few roving zombies. So of course, we hear nothing more of it again.

In closing, the main thing that comes to my mind is that I’m genuinely surprised how quickly I’ve gotten through this one. For the movie itself, it may seem like I’m being too hard on this movie, and I will admit I’ close to second-guessing myself. In hindsight, what this is above all is a ‘70s horror movie, and as such, it’s well above average. It’s not up to the standards of Dawn of the Dead or Dead of Night (maybe the only movie I set aside as too good for this feature), but it’s a long way from the randomized editing and frivolous shocks that make far too many better-made films especially annoying to me. It’s by all means worth watching, at least once, and if you do, there’s still a good chance that you’ll want to watch it again. I, for one, count that as enough to pass on the curve.

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Big Mouth Mayhem!

 

To round out my "fifth week" lineup, I decided it was time for an extra dino blog. This time around, I have kind of a backlog, simply because there's what I consider a whole category of dinos. They aren't big, they aren't flashy, and they certainly aren't good, but when it comes to "silly", these guys give even the patchisaurs a run for their money. Here are the big-mouth dinos, starting with a pic with Bossk.

For the background, it should go without saying that "big mouth" is a term of my own creation, though I was a little surprised I didn't find it in independent use already. My definition is a hollow creature made from rubber or otherwise flexible material, with an opening into the interior space at the mouth. A secondary characteristic is that they are larger than usual for low-end dinos, sometimes extraordinarily so. From what can be known, they were definitely being made in the 1970s if not earlier, by manufacturers including Dormei, Arco and Imperial (see the Genericzilla Junior post). Unsurprisingly, there's plenty of gray area, especially on what you count as a dinosaur. Many toys made with the same technique and materials represent lizards, crocs, and other relatively mundane creatures. Others represented dragons and other fantasy creatures, a trend that intensified in the 1980s with a wave of He-Man knockoffs. While several egregious offenders released examples with proper manufacturing marks, most were as anonymous and untraceable as we should now expect. Here's a pair from my collection that I'm sure must have come from the same manufacturer.

For this particular set, I had the one on the right when I was a kid. I picked the one up on the right in the wild a few years back. I knew on sight that it was part of a set with my old dino, though at that point, I wasn't sure I still had it. Eventually, the old one turned up in one of my searches, and there were no real surprises on examination. The gimmick with these pair is that they glow in the dark. Overall, they actually look more realistic than might be expected, though how they came up with the "crest" on the carnosaur's head is anyone's guess. Here's some more pics.

"C'mon, let's ditch these nerds... `Incoming asteroid', what's that even mean?"

And to show what I mean about realism, here's another specimen I picked up in the second-hand stores, as I recall in a set that also had a patchisaur Pteranodon. It's one thing to make a goofy creature and call it a dinosaur, it's another to give it the name of a cool dino that was getting famous. And to think we complained about Velociraptor being portrayed without feathers...

Here's one more closeup.

Now's the time for further rambling. In my recollections, these were toys even I viewed as disposable, and I wasn't wrong. I'm sure there's more I still have and many more that disappeared long ago.  The only ones I really formed any further memories around were a pair that came on a birthday cake and a huge example that I'm sure was well over 6 inches tall that battled Husky and Sidekick Carl on occasion. Over time, they faded away, but never disappeared entirely. Meanwhile, I  gradually found a certain fondness for these guys. Then... I found this. And bought it, so I would have proof it exists. Oh dear Logos, how the Hell does this thing exist???

It kind of looks okay on this side, doesn't it? But take another look...

Wow. The thing about mass production is that you have interchangeable molds so basic symmetry isn't a problem. It would practically be easier and cheaper to do it right than to have it come out this wrong. Then we still haven't had a closeup. The horror, the horror...

And with that, I'm definitely ready to quit. That's all for now, more to come!

Animation Defenestration: The one with fairies and machine guns

 

Title: Wizards

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Mashup/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: What the Hell??? (2/4)

 

With this review, I’m back with yet another new feature that I’m starting now because several other options required more time than I had or flat-out fell through. And this time, I feel like I’m going down to the DNA of this blog, as I come back to just about the first thing I tried when I tried moving beyond self-published fiction and disability/ self-advocacy rants. This is my true return to animation with an actual feature for animated feature films. It was probably inevitable that the one movie at hand (at least besides Hotel Transylvania 3) would be the one movie from the one filmmaker that just about kept me away from reviewing animation. Here is Wizards, the most famous film not rated X by Ralph Bakshi, and I feel like this is the trailer for Wrath of Kahn. Bakshi! Baaakshiii!!! BAAAAKSHIIII!!!!

Our story begins with an opening narration, introducing a post-apocalyptic world where magic has replaced technology and two brothers become its greatest wizards and mortal enemies. Fast forward a few centuries, and the defeated evil wizard Blackwolf has returned, now aided by the rediscovered technology of guns and war machines, plus a projector that can energize his forces and terrify their fairy enemies with images of Nazis on the warpath. As Blackwolf’s motley armies rout the forces of good (tanks against swords would do that well enough), the good wizard Avatar reemerges after narrowly escaping an assassination. He joins up with a beautiful or at least buxom fairy named Ellinore, a hot-tempered elven warrior Weehawk and a turncoat minion of Blackwolf to go on a quest to find Blackwolf and destroy his magic. They will find possible allies and new enemies at every turn, and the greatest threat will lie in their own ranks. But it all comes down to a duel between dark magic and… a Luger pistol?

Wizards was the fourth animated feature film by Ralph Bakshi, and his first inarguable success after the X-rated 1972 film Fritz The Cat. The production was backed by 20^th Century Fox, with the original title “War Wizards”, as a collaboration between Bakshi and artists Ian Miller and Mark Ploog. The film was made with a combination of traditional animation, live-action and rotoscoping. The voice cast included Bob Holt as Avatar, character actor David Proval as the defector Peace, and Susan Tyrrell (see… the Dawn of the Dead documentary?) as the narrator. The film was immediately successful on release, reportedly (per Bakshi) outperforming a re-release of Fantasia (see… Allegro Non Troppo???),  but lost revenue after the release of Star Wars (maybe coincidence). Bakshi went on to make Lord of the Rings the following year, using the same techniques and technology, and later Fire And Ice. In a further convergence, Miller contributed heavily to A Tolkien Bestiary, originally published in 1979. Wizards was released on DVD in 2004, following an online petition. It has been out of print in recent years, but remains available through digital streaming.

For my experiences, this is a movie that I came to by a long trail. First, I practically grew up with the Tolkien Bestiary, well before I got a personal copy I consulted for this review. Along the way, I also saw the animated Lord of the Rings, which I can’t recall in full before college but definitely encountered by the early 1990s. It was probably sometime in the prolonged gridlock of unemployment that I finally looked this one up. It was like seeing all my memories sliced, diced and blendered, and it wasn’t lost on me that this actually came first. It went a long way to seal my further conflicted opinion of Bakshi’s work. Notwithstanding my comments above, I don’t dislike his work from what I know of it. But a big part of that is that it fails to connect with me on a more fundamental level than movies I hate. I know I don’t “get” it; what I’m not convinced of is whether that can be all on me.

What’s front and center in this movie is Bakshi’s gleeful disregard for boundaries. This is very significant, because most movies that mix animation and live-action still adhere to the “rules” of both mediums. Roger Rabbit look like he could be drawn by the same hands as Jessica and the weasels, and Eddie Valiant would really die if he got hit by the steam roller. Here, the only consistency is that nothing is consistent, not genre, not tone, not visual style, not even the medium, and the result is mixed at best. Having elves and fairies duking it out with marauders with machine guns is all good fun, up to a point. But the hodgepodge of near-incompatible characters, settings and backgrounds quickly becomes even more strange and distracting than the further mixing with stock footage and rotoscoping. (The female characters,  even more grotesquely overendowed than in Heavy Metal, don’t help.) Overall, there’s simply nothing like this outside Bakshi’s work except Toho’s hallucinogenic House, which I personally described as “The Shining made by the creators of South Park”, and there can be no question there’s a reason nobody followed in their footsteps.

With all that said, the question still remains, are the story, the characters, and the movie itself any good? This is where it’s easy to feel overwhelmed enough to punt, as I effectively did with House. But this is a case where I find the strangeness to be more a diversion than a fundamental part of the thing itself (shades of Zardoz?). Underneath all the weirdness, what we have are some moderately interesting characters going on an adventure that’s boilerplate even by sword-and-sorcery standards. Even then, the main characters hardly do anything until the very end, which is so deliberately abrupt that it feels like a throwaway gag from another story. (Wait a minute… did Raiders of the Lost Ark rip off this movie???) Then one more thing that bothers me is the whole Nazi angle, and this is where I can allow the film simply reflects conditions we can no longer understand. Now, we can see the Tigers, Stukas and goosestepping Nazis as propaganda for a side that was probably always going to lose, but this is with the movie further into the past than World War 2 was in the 1970s. Yet, we have always known animation can transcend time and context. The final verdict, as with the still far better Allegro Non Troppo, is that this movie does not.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and there is indeed one that is far and away my favorite. It is also one that has long stirred up a strong sense of déjà vu, to the point that I’m sure I must somehow have seen it long before the movie as a whole. Early in the film, we find one of Blackwolf’s stormtroopers peering down at a fallen companion. At first, he shakes his comrade, trying to wake him up. There’s comical overstatement but also real pathos as he finally cries out, “They’ve killed Fritz! They’ve killed Fritz!” He begins cursing the fairies and firing wildly, without initially noticing that the fallen trooper is back on his feet. The following dialogue is too priceless to recount, with Bakshi himself voicing Fritz. It all culminates in the inevitable but not entirely predictable ironic twist, with the tragedy of all war being that the living still learn nothing.

In closing, my usual self-defense on the rating will serve here mainly to introduce the rating scale. I am staying with the scale I first developed for the Revenant Review, simply because the only animation bad enough to justify my old Space 1979 scale wasn’t going into theatrical films. For further comparison, I would say that this movie is better than Rock And Rule (the closest I’ve previously come to covering Bakshi in an actual animation review), and perhaps equal to the Transformers movie, which somehow comes out as possibly less weird. Against other animation I have reviewed, however, it falls well behind, even compared to The Plague Dogs, the only animated feature I ever thought I might have been too hard on. In the proverbial light of day, it’s the kind of film that’s “overrated” simply because too many people elevated it far beyond what its creators were trying to do. It’s well-made, influential, and by any standard worth watching, but the best to said is that it laid the way for better things.

Fiction: Percy the Robot Cop returns

 I was planning a fiction post this week, and I was thinking of taking a little break from Sidekick Carl. So, here's something I fished out from a forlorn project I've featured before, the adventures of Percy the robot cop, an ancient character I moved to a setting based on the 1964 World's Fair. (This also led by convoluted paths to the Evil Possum adventure.) I came up with this as a prologue deal, so there's a fair amount of exposition, but for once none of it really got in the way of the scene. So, here goes...

The vehicle that pulled up was a bright yellow van with black trim, with a grill the exact shape of a smiling face. The hum of its motor cut off a moment before it came to a full stop. The figure that climbed out looked human, complete with a fleshed out face, but the nose was too long and narrow to be natural, and what looked like a visor and helmet covered his eyes and scalp. It was also apparent that his fingers were made of metallic segments, casually resembling the gauntlets of a knight. As he emerged, a red and blue light popped out of the top of his helmet.

The building the figure approached was 200 meters tall with a flared top and tapered base that vaguely resembled a capital letter I, one of a number of similar buildings clustered between a monorail loop and the arc of an elevated road. Most of the windows in the building’s face were lit, and a small crowd had gathered at its foot. A slit in the newcomer’s visor glowed brighter as he approached a knot of officers in uniform. One of them, a long-nosed creature that resembled a 2-meter root vegetable covered in spines, waved and whistled. Two evidently human and nearly identical officers in special combat armor looked up from a set of blueprints. One of the few without a uniform, a woman with hair that appeared to be a shade of blue, carefully examined the visored officer. She was the one who stepped forward to greet him.

“My name is O'Keefe, Social Services," she said. "We have a disturbance on the 27^th floor. The tenants are a family unit with a history of reports and multiple flags for mental health oversight. Two neighbors say they heard a scream. The alarm was tripped by a consent monitor. Unfortunately, it’s an old model building, so we don’t know any more than that.”

The newcomer was obviously unconcerned. “We never know what matters till we get there,” he said. “I’m going in…”

While the officer’s nose was strictly decorative, he did have a keen sense of smell, mostly through sensors on the inside of his mouth. The first thing he detected as he entered the apartment door was the smell of blood, and the underlying smell of dark bile. His infrared showed a pool of warm fluid, too much and not nearly warm enough. He stepped over as much of it as he could. “I’m Police Robot C,” he called out. “You can call me Percy.” He drew a plasma pistol at his side.

“I hear you,” he said. His sensors did indeed pick up heavy breathing and muffled cries, from the direction of the bedroom. “Aww, for crying out loud…” He smashed a door open. He beheld two figures struggling on a thick mat set up as a bed. His visor resolved them into a somewhat overweight man and a flat-chested young woman of about 15, just as the man rolled over with a knife at the girl’s throat.

“Don’t worry, kid, I got you,” Percy said, “and you, whatever the frink you’re doing, I’m sure the boys at rehab are working on a cure for it. Just let her go, and we’ll take you in.” He raised the gun, but both of the humans were making sudden movements that threw off his targeting reticle. He calculated the odds of stunning them both with a near miss, but the effects were always unpredictable and often included convulsions. The man rose with a sudden lunge, dragging the girl with him. To Percy’s surprise, he spoke.

“Make her give it back,” the man said, with every appearance of earnestness.

“Sorry, I’m not tracking context,” Percy said. “Drop the knife, and we’ll sort it out.”

“She’s not what you think,” the man said with growing urgency. “She acts innocent, but she has powers. She can control your mind. She can take your soul! Make her give it back!”

“Not our jurisdiction,” Percy said. “And since most folks that believe in souls say I don’t have one, I gotta say it seems a bit overrated. Now drop the knife!”

The girl suddenly cried out plaintively, “My mother! Where’s my mother? Xhoi, what did you do to my mother?”

“Aww…. I’m sure we’ll find her,” Percy said. In his considerable peripheral vision, he glanced back at the pool he had stepped over. He scrolled through files, and came up with a name. “You must be Diellza, but I bet your friends just call you Daisy.”

“Don’t you get it? She doesn’t have friends!” the man screamed. “Our people know what she is!”

“Stay with me, kid, and we’ll get through this,” Percy said. “And I’ve had just about enough out of you. Put down that knife, now!”

“No,” the man said, his voice suddenly soft. “You can kill me, but I’m taking back my soul!” Even as he spoke, there were two dull bangs as a pair of slugs bored through the wall behind him. The girl dropped to a half-crouch, clutching the knife in her shoulder. She gave an oddly delayed but utterly bloodcurdling scream.

“Thanks, Hexley… and Hexley,” Percy said. “I’m securing the aggressor and the hostage now.” He lowered the gun and approached the man. He wasn’t dead, yet, and there looked to be a chance he might pull through. Then, incredibly, he rolled over. He stared at her, and she returned his stare with a piercing gaze that left even Percy unsettled. The man flinched, and then the girl screamed again.

“C’mon, kid, everything’s okay now,” Percy said. Somehow, she kept screaming as she reached for the knife. “Hey, don’t do that, it’ll probably make things worse.” She pulled out the knife, and the flow of blood from her shoulder intensified immediately. Percy was reaching for a medical pack on his belt when she raised the knife.

“Don’t do it, kid!” he shouted. “They’ll lock you up, too!” Then the knife came down as she gave another shriek, and the apartment lit up with the flash of Percy’s pistol.

Super Movies! The one that was the first Disney superhero movie

 

Title: The Rocketeer

What Year?: 1991

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

In the last month or so, I’ve been going through the process of evaluating which of my review features to continue. For this feature in particular, what I quickly recognized is that, despite the theme and a number of very early candidates, I never really had a plan for what to do. If anything, this feature has been about how eclectic “comic book” movies really are. In further pondering what I might want to do before wrapping this up, I had no trouble at all coming up with a lineup of movies, most of which I had had in mind for a very long time. In the midst of them, there was one more I thought of mostly because I had recently heard it mentioned elsewhere recently. On further consideration, I decided that this was indeed the one that the feature wouldn’t be complete without, all the more so as I considered its history. With that, I present The Rocketeer, a movie that kid me didn’t like.

Our story begins with our generically masculine hero Cliff going on a test flight of a plane that in real life killed almost everyone who ever flew it. Surprisingly, he only crashes after the plane is damaged in a gun battle between criminals and uncertainly identified law enforcement agents that ends with a fiery car crash on the runway. When Cliff and his mechanic buddy (not named Buddy, but it wouldn’t have been surprising) look around their hangar, they discover the bad guys left something behind, a shiny experimental rocket pack. Meanwhile, we meet Cliff’s love interest, Jenny, a struggling actress trying to get a role alongside a jerk movie star named Neville Sinclair. The shenanigans and mishaps continue as Cliff tries out the rocket pack and also gets Jenny fired. After a public rescue in costume, he acquires the name The Rocketeer, but also draws the attention of the bad guys, particularly a huge and nearly invulnerable goon named Lothar. They want the rocket pack, and soon they kidnap Jenny to get it. To save her, Cliff must go to face the leader of the bad guys- none other than the movie star Sinclair!

The Rocketeer was a 1991 movie by Disney/ Buena Vista, based on a comic by Dave Stevens first published in 1982. Stevens reportedly pitched a film based on his character to several studios before it was optioned by Disney around 1986, in parallel with several other comic/ superhero properties. The film was directed by ILM veteran Joe Johnston, following his successful debut with Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, with Billy Campbell in the title role, Jennifer Connelly as Jenny and Timothy Dalton as Sinclair. Other cast included Alan Arkin as the mechanic Peevy and former basketball player Tiny Ron Taylor as Lothar. The movie received a high-profile release and intensive merchandising, though plans for a toy line were cancelled by Disney. The film was a commercial disappointment, despite favorable critical reviews, earning $46.7 million against an estimated budget of up to $40M. A parody of the film was created for the Disney cartoon Talespin, titled “Bullethead Baloo”, which aired before the movie’s release.

Going to my experiences, I very clearly remember seeing this movie on VHS around the time of its original release. My strongest further recollection is that I was more impressed by the cartoon parody than the actual movie. When I got to thinking about it again, I ordered a Blu Ray rather than go through the wait for it to come through my Netflix queue. As I watched it, I found it strange and unsatisfying for reasons I couldn’t quite define, almost certainly the same reaction as I had as a kid. As I have worked out my thoughts for this review, what finally dawned on me is that this a movie that tries to evoke nostalgia for a bygone era without demonstrating any real understanding of it. The strange part about this is that there were in fact plenty of successful attempts through the 1980s and ‘90s either to revive 1930s properties or create original works set within the period: Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon, Darkman, even the revived Batman franchise, which effectively built up from the premise of an alternate universe where Art Deco never died. And then what gets most irritating is that I encountered and liked many of these works before and since, as well as plenty of stuff actually from the 1930s. (Stanley Weinbaum gets a name drop.) If I don’t like or “get” a movie like this, the problem cannot be just with me.

Turning to the movie itself, the obvious problems come out in the casting, with the Rocketeer/ Campbell being the most prominent casualty. This is admittedly very subjective, but I personally cannot get any sense of fun from the character or the actor. To make the obvious comparison, Indiana Jones spends more time screwing up than accomplishing anything, but it was always fun to watch Harrison Ford playing him. Just to show this isn’t arm-waving, I offer Arkin and especially Dalton for contrast, easily the best of the male cast and the two who most genuinely feel like they belong here. Lothar is an extra element that doesn’t work as well as it should; it’s all good fun, but the Rondo Hatton makeup is distracting and no more effective than the likes of Richard Kiel and Bill Heinzman were without it. But to me, the egregious offender is Connelly, who never does much more than coast along. Again, this is a personal call, but I find her even more devoid of energy and enthusiasm than Campbell, and the “chemistry” between them is even more bafflingly lacking. (I am aware they were apparently “involved” in real life, but I decline to comment on that.) I find all the more fault as she is quite possibly the best performer in the whole movie, yet I still can’t find at any moment when it seems like she wants to do anything but read her lines, collect her paycheck and get off the set.

With all that in mind, there are still problems well beyond what routine analysis can account for. This is where the critic really can’t get much further without looking at the comic, which I didn’t care to add to my time and expenses for one movie review. The gut feeling I get, however, is that this feels like what would happen if someone looked at any given comic book and drew exactly the wrong conclusions about the medium. It has all the action, the machines and costumes, even a fair amount of humor, but almost none of the vivid characters, the social commentary or moral values that make the best examples interesting. In parallel to these flaws is the simple fact that this was given to an effects guy, with the typical outcome (see Silent Running) of “good” effects that not only fail to make up for other problems but are themselves undermined by subtle flaws in framing and pacing. I could easily add a further rant about the James Horner soundtrack, which feels like Horner not just copying himself but deliberately watering it down. And that brings us to the elephant in the room, the almost incalculable “Disney” factor, in which almost everything feels as tame and slowed down as a kiddie ride.

Now I’m going longer than usual, and I still don’t have the “one scene”. Just by blind random, I’m going with our introduction to Dalton’s character. We find him on the set of what is presumably a historical adventure, matching blades and banter with a villain as a masked adventurer. There’s a full-fledged “meta” feel as Dalton hams up the role within a role, effectively enough that we could well believe this is how he would behave with or without cameras rolling. In the middle of it all, our Errol Flynn analog removes his mask for a dramatic reveal that draws a cry from the onlooking starlet, but of course means nothing to us. The defeat of the villain is quickly put out of the way so he can lay down innuendo on the leading lady. It’s exactly the kind of effective moment that makes a flawed movie more frustrating. It’s clear in this scene that those involved in the film understood the time and setting they were portraying. So why does the film as a whole keep failing to connect with the time and ultimately the audience.

In conclusion, this is where I would usually explain my rating. This time, however, all I can say is that I was genuinely surprised to give a rating this low to such a clearly competent production. The only movie I’ve covered so far that I can compare it to is Lady Snowblood, but unlike that movie, I feel no hesitation and even less regret. The deeper parallel is that both movies represent “should” have had no trouble connecting with me in particular. For all my life, I have appreciated 1930s media, both from the period and about it, possibly even more than Japanese cinema. The problem with this movie is not that I can’t appreciate what it is trying to do, but that it absolutely fails, to a degree that is only fully apparent if you know the period and source material as well as I do now. Even so, I can’t believe this was entirely lost on regular viewers and impressionable kids when the movie came out, or it wouldn’t have been struggling at the box office in the same timeframe where movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman were succeeding. The lesson is that authenticity matters, no matter how limited the audience’s frame of reference. And if you can’t do that, you’re better off doing something else.