Burl reviews Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown! (1977)

 

Good grief, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an animated picture: one of the few I actually saw in the theatre! Growing up I had a neighbourhood theatre, what Variety used to call a “nabe” before all the nabes closed down! That's a very sad loss to me, and I expect it is to you too! Anyway, I used to go down to my nabe every wek and see whatever was playing, and if it wasn’t some weird Sunn Classics pseudodocumentary, or a genuine motion picture like The Bad News Bears or The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, it was a children’s animation just like today’s picture, Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown!

I remember enjoying it at the time, ha ha, but then I was just a wee tyke and my critical faculties had not yet been fully honed! I’ve watched it again several times over the past five years or so because my son had fallen under the Peanuts spell and so I went and hunted down a VHS copy of it! The Peanuts spell is a perfectly healthy spell so far as I’m concerned, and it was a pleasure to watch the movie again when I initially found the VHS, and an undiminished pleasure to watch it once more the other day!

We were at a wilderness cabin for the screening, and it was a very hot and summery evening, and these are the second most ideal circumstances under which to see this picture, the first most, naturally, being to see it at the nabe when you’re six years old! Ha ha! But however you watch it, the movie remains the story of the Peanuts gang, or selected members thereof, attending a summer camp and engaging in a raft race through an endless variety of landscapes such as you find described in books like Blood Meridian!

Charlie Brown proves himself a blockhead right from the opening moments, after the credits and their bad-but-catchy theme song that is, when he fails to step back on the bus after a rest stop and must travel the rest of the way riding pillion on Snoopy’s chopper, in constant screaming terror for his life! Once there, a group of camp bullies take Charlie Brown to task straight away for his round head, his bizarre name (?), and his pathetically evident need to prove himself! Only Linus cracking his blanket like a whip rescues the hydrocephalic hero from his trouble!

After some camp gags and a few competitive activities which the bullies win by rank underhandedness, the race is under way! Our hero gang divide themselves by gender: Charlie Brown, Linus, Franklin, and Schroeder in one boat; Lucy, Sally, Peppermint Patty and Marcie in another; and of course Snoopy and Woodstock participate in the race too, using their own jury-rigged watercraft! The bullies have a powerboat equipped with radar and sonar and all manner of technology, and they, along with their spike-collared cat, engage in never-ending shenanigans in their monomaniacal effort to win!

Ha ha, I always thought the Peanuts gang were supposed to be six or seven years old, but this race, which takes multiple days and shunts them through an array of biospheres and climates, landscapes of desolation and abundance, through blasting sites, fishing villages, and over waterfalls, would test the mettle of the most cunning raftsman! On top of these hardships, the gang must not only contend with the bullies and their fiendish plots, but Peppermint Patty’s deluded, fascistic idea of how democracy works, and how it must be constantly applied by secret ballot to every decision made by the group!

The movie’s own politics are equally confused, as, after a series of highly annoying episodes in which Patty’s balloting madness results in, for example, the boys being forced to sleep outside in a (highly incongruous) snowstorm, some cohesion is only reached when she appoints Charlie Brown as Supreme Leader, singularly responsible for all decision-making! And while this doesn’t lead to triumph in the race, it at least helps prevent the bullies from winning, so there’s some semblance of a happy ending; at least, as much of one as a depressive like Charles M. Schultz could manage!

It’s a nice-looking picture, adhering to the patented simplicity of the Peanuts world, but mustering a bountiful supply of landscape and flora to spruce it up; and of course it wins points for using real children as the kids’ voices! One big debit, though, is the treatment of poor Franklin, who is given virtually nothing to say or do! I’ve always liked Franklin, so would that it were otherwise - and, I mean, just look at that poster! He doesn't even get his own little name-box! Shameful, says I! I give Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown two and a half corned willies!

Burl reviews The Nightmare Before Christmas! (1993)

Ha ha, ho ho ho and booga booga too, it’s Burl! Yes, I’ve just come from a special screening of the animated picture The Nightmare Before Christmas, with a full orchestra playing the Danny Elfman score, so perhaps this review will be slightly skewed by this charming and unusual movie-going experience! Or perhaps not; it’s hard to say! All I know is that it was y first time seeing this picture in any scenario, so my impression will always be that its standout quality was the music!

And this of course is hardly fair to the animation, which is stellar! The story I found less compelling, but that’s okay! It all takes place in the magical world of holidays: each special calendar day, it turns out, has its own little world, which is responsible for that particular holiday! Ha ha, I guess it’s a stretch to call Halloween a “holiday,” because, after all, it’s not exactly holy, and more crucially, your boss doesn’t give you the day off of work!

But anyway, in Halloweentown, a lanky fellow called Jack Skellington is the Pumpkin King, the fellow evidently most responsible for coming up with their annual scary Halloween gambits! Everyone loves Jack, ha ha, but he himself falls prey to a vague but powerful misgiving, a feeling that there must be more to life than Halloween! And so there is: he comes across a forest glen where trees are marked, restroom-style, with the symbols of different holidays, and the trees prove to be doors! After a brief sojourn in Christmastown, Jack is charmed by the concept and resolves to bring Yuletide joy to Halloweentown!

Jack’s specific plan is a little half-baked, but he ends up masterminding the kidnapping of Santa Claus, whom he imagines to be a towering half-man, half-lobster with snapping claws and crushing mandibles! This turns out to be a misapprehension, ha ha!

Anyway, by the time Christmas comes and Jack is riding a coffin-sled pulled by skeleton reindeer, he’s given cause to regret his rash embrace of someone else’s holiday, and Santa certainly upbraids him for the attempt! Ha ha, perhaps Jack would have been better off appropriating Casimir Pulaski Day! Christmas is saved in the end, and the main bad guy, some sort of boogen living in the basement, is revealed as being made of bugs!

There are Tim Burton design touches everywhere to be found, which would surely have felt fresher back in 1993! Ha ha, Christmastown is sort of boring and boilerplate; you can tell his heart is in Halloween! The movie itself was directed by Henry Selick, who later did a fine job with Coraline and other creepy animations! Jack is given voice in song by Elfman himself, which occasionally gives the thing the flavor of a feature-length Oingo Boingo video; his speaking voice, less frequently heard, comes from Chris Sarandon, well-known from Fright Night! Catherine O’Hara from The Paper provides the female voices, and William Hickey from The Sentinel is a nasty duck-lipped scientist!

I enjoyed watching the picture, but having missed out on it all these years, I can’t see it becoming a holiday perennial for me! Maybe there were just too many songs! But there’s lots to admire, and the live orchestral accompaniment was a lot of fun, so I’m giving The Nightmare Before Christmas two and a half shrunken heads!

Burl reviews The Rescuers! (1977)

Good day, it’s Burl here with another Disney picture to tell you about! Ha ha, this one, The Rescuers, isn’t quite in the Disney Classic category alongside Dumbo – no, it came along during a period in which the company was maybe floundering creatively a little bit! Old Walt was ten years in the cryonic chamber at this point, and the House of Mouse was putting out things like Pete’s Dragon and Candleshoe and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo! It’s not that those are bad pictures, but they’re no Superdad, ha ha!

Anyway, along with the Herbie picture, The Rescuers was their big summer release of 1977, and I can only imagine that both were swallowed whole by Star Wars, ha ha! But if The Rescuers did poorly at the box office, it was probably just as much because, speaking frankly for a moment, it’s not all that great! The narrative is pretty baggy, the characters thin, the songs unmemorable and the action repetitive! It occasionally looks nice though, and I’ll try to list some of its other attributes as well!

We open with a sad little girl, Penny, tossing a message-in-a-bottle off an old riverboat! This note is found by an international society of mice dedicated to helping people in trouble! A novel enough concept, certainly, but it seems like almost any of this society’s other adventures would surely be more exciting than the one we are to be given!

This is kind of a running theme! The mouse agents chosen to rescue Penny from her dilemma are Bernard, a stammering janitor-mouse voiced by Bob “Catch 22” Newhart, and Miss Bianca, the Hungarian delegate, played by Eva Gabor! Both do a fine enough job, but one feels that any other two agents might have been picked instead, and they would be at least as good or better!

And what is Penny’s dilemma? Ha ha, well, she has quite a few! She’s a poor orphan girl, and except for an elderly cat is apparently friendless, and on top of that she gets kidnapped by nasty fortune hunters who need a person of small stature to go down a slime pit to search for a legendary diamond! Geraldine Fitzgerald voices the principal antagonist, Madame Medusa, who, despite Miss Fitzgerald’s admirable hamming, is nothing but an inferior copy of Cruela De Vil! Her secret lair is not an old family mansion but a decrepit riverboat, and she keeps a pair of alligators as pets! (The gators don’t talk, which is odd considering almost every other kind of animal can in this picture!) Altogether, it’s another case where the backstory of how Medusa and her droopy-dog henchman Mr. Snoops began their odd partnership, and how they became aware of the huge pirate diamond they’re searching for, might well have been more compelling than the far end of the tale we're being shown!

Bernard and Miss Bianca’s love story works about as well as you’d expect it to between those two actors, and between those two characters! Familiar voices are present and accounted for in, and helpful to, most of the other characters, like John “Herbie Rides Again” McIntire as Rufus, and perennial hayseed Pat Buttram as the corn likker-drinkin’ swamp rat Luke! While it has moments of charm and humour, and best of all a queer swamp-Gothic weirdness, it’s unquestionably a minor work, and some extra labouring over the story would have been much appreciated! I give The Rescuers one and a half proto sea-doos!

Burl reviews Inside Out! (2015)

Ha ha, Burl in the house, here to review a children’s cartoon! Yes, I went to see Inside Out, which is the newest children’s cartoon from the people who brought us Toy Story so long ago! And indeed I attended this chidren’s cartoon with a child, and he seemed to enjoy himself; but you know what? I enjoyed it too! Ha ha!

It’s a colourful tale, set largely inside the head of an eleven year-old girl called Riley! Her mind is depicted as a control room staffed by five somewhat arbitrarily-chosen emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger! (Is disgust an emotion, or would it be classified more as a reaction? Who can say!) True to her name, the girl is living a pretty stress-free life, which explains why Joy is far an away the dominant force in the control room! But of course things go awry: a move from her home in Minnesota to the rollercoaster streets of San Francisco precipitates an emotional crisis that has the emotions in a flurry!

To make matters worse, Joy and Sadness are whisked away to some other part of the brain, and spend much of the movie trying to get back to the control room with the help of Bing Bong, once Riley’s imaginary friend, now forgotten but still roaming the corridors of the young girl’s mind! Ha ha, Bing Bong grew to become my favourite character in the movie, with his ultimate moment almost causing ol’ Burl’s eyes to get a tad misty! Well, that’s being a dad for you I guess! You become a real willoughby!

The picture is all about the bittersweet experience of growing up of course, as all these Pixar movies seem to be! Well, that’s okay, ha ha, it’s a rich subject! It’s been pointed out that this particular movie is only watchable because Riley has no real problems – if we were within the mind of a child in the horrific circumstances in which far too many of them live, it would be a desperate horrorshow! Of course Pixar could not make that movie and expect to turn a profit, ha ha, so as a result, even if the reasons are perfectly explicable, the picture seems a bit of a dodge!

It’s entertaining enough, though! The real-life segments are less so, even if the kindly parents are played by familiar actors Diane “Streets of Fire” Lane and Kyle “Dune” MacLaughlan! The brain interiors are the real heart of the picture, and it’s never less than engaging during these bits! Perhaps things are a little simplistic, and perhaps the movie trips over its own (ha ha) interior logic now and again, but remember, it’s a child’s cartoon!

And if a child’s cartoon is what you want, you could do far, far, far worse than this! It’s colourful, compelling and clever, contains a vocal cameo from Frank “American Werewolf in London” Oz, and the main character plays hockey! Ha ha, an unexpected plus! I give Inside Out three goofball islands!

Burl reviews Toy Story! (1995)

A good day to you! Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review an animated picture from… what? Almost twenty years back? Why, how time does fly! Ha ha, I still think of Toy Story as a new picture, I guess, because it fits in so well with all the many computer animated movies that have been made steadily ever since!

Now, I’ll tell you right off the bat that I’ve never seen any of these pictures! Ha ha, the most recently-made animated feature film I’ve seen is Beauty and the Beast, which I saw in the theater with a ladyfri*nd way back in 1991! I guess all these years I figured they were mainly films for kids, and that I would one day have a kid of my own with whom I could watch them! And now that’s the case, ha ha!

So until yesterday, I’d never seen Toy Story, and now I have! “Ha ha, what did you think of it, Burl?” you’re probably saying to your computer screen right now! Well, I thought it was pretty amusing! It was fast-paced and funny, just as I was expecting it to be!

Tom Hanks, famed from his appearance in The Money Pit, stars as Woody, a talking-cowboy doll which bears no resemblance to any actual toy I’ve ever heard of! He’s the de facto leader of the playthings in Andy’s room, but his benevolent rule, and his status as Andy’s Favourite, are threatened when the lad receives a Buzz Lightyear for his birthday present! There’s acrimony in toyland, and the two rivals must undertake a harrowing journey through a space-themed pizza restaurant and the home of a sadistic child, and not miss the moving van that will soon take everybody to a new home! Each must deal with his own troubles along the way: Buzz has to realizeand then deal with the realization that he’s not a real space ranger but only a child’s amuse-bon; while Woody must address his tendency toward mild unctuousness!

The movie is a trifle, but an enjoyable one! The voice casting is marvelous: Tim Allen, who is probably best known for his headlining appearance in What Do You Say To A Naked Lady?, sounds remarkably like Mel Gibson in his role as Buzz! Wallace Shawn from My Dinner With André plays a meek dinosaur; John Ratzenberger, known principally for his role in Protocol, is an officious pig; Annie Potts of Ghostbusters is a sexy Bo Peep; R. Lee Ermey of Full Metal Jacket is, of course, the leader of a platoon of army men; and Laurie Metcalf of Uncle Buck is Andy’s mom!

Little details delight the semi-alert viewer throughout, like the Alien-themed bop-em at the pizza place, or the fact that Andy’s house is being sold by Virtual Realty, or the mix-n-matched mutant toys led by a crab-legged confabulation that could only have been inspired by The Thing! I suppose the computer animation must look pretty crude to purveyors of todays cartoonshows, but it looked okay to me! I think I was right to start my journey into feature-length computer animation with the first one of them made!

There wasn’t much work done on the details of how life as a toy really works, though a set of capital-R Rules is alluded to at one point! Nor were they much concerned with providing any internal logic to the fancy! But ha ha, none of this bothered ol’ Burl! I guess I should watch the sequels, and maybe that has more of that business, if I ever do get curious about it! At any rate, it’s an inoffensive and fast-paced amusement, and I give it two and a half tributes to Gary Larson!

Burl reviews Dumbo! (1941)

Rootin-tootin-scootin, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a classic in animation for you, the fine Disney picture Dumbo! Ha ha, you’ve all seen it, I’m sure, but I hadn’t! Not until recently anyway! I’d certainly seen bits of it, like the parts General Robert Stack weeps over during his screening in 1941, but that’s about it!

The biggest surprise I found in the picture was that Dumbo doesn’t really fly until the end! I thought his flying would be a big part of the movie, and that he would have many flying adventures! Maybe they were saving those for the (ha ha, non-existent) sequels, and this was meant as more of an origin story!

And indeed it does begin with his origin: in point of fact, delivery by stork! The particular stork delivering Dumbo is an elderly slowbones, a little muddle-headed, and his slack performance causes needless grief for dowdy Mrs. Jumbo! Dumbo – whose real name, Jumbo Jr., is quickly forgotten – finds himself in a world of nasty lady elephants, unfeeling clowns, a self-obsessed ringmaster and, thankfully, a good-hearted mouse! When Mrs. Jumbo goes ape trying to protect her offspring’s good name, she is locked up as mad, and the mouse becomes Dumbo’s only friend!

The movie doesn’t overdo Dumbo’s tribulations, I’m glad to say! Neither does it condemn his episode of accidental drunkenness! In fact, had Dumbo and the mouse not accidentally imbibed clown champagne, they never would have discovered his magical flying powers in the first place!

The movie is full to bursting with beautiful circus imagery and great character voices! Ha ha, that mouse is marvelous! Even the songs are pretty good, and not too numerous! I would echo Sigfried Kracauer’s critique of the picture though: the famed theorist complained that, while Dumbo might well have used his power of flight to soar off “toward some unknown paradise,” he instead chose to remain “the highly-paid star of the same circus director who once flogged his mother Jumbo.” Though the obvious answer is that Dumbo is choosing to remain with his mother and only incidentally with the circus itself, it still does seem as though one of the movie’s takeaway messages is that forgiveness can be bought with perks and comforts! And the rest of the animals still must dwell in their cramped quarters, after all!

The movie is a little thin, maybe – Dumbo never speaks a word in the picture, so as a character he’s a little lacking! Ha ha, but the garrulous mouse, the bumptious crows (whose Negro coding, while sympathetic, is the movie’s most outdated element), the bi*chy elepantresses and the deluded ringmaster all help to make up for that doughnut hole!

It’s a terrific picture overall, brisk and breezy at 64 minutes, beautiful to look at, frequently clever and often charming! Casey Jr. is a marvelous little train, too! I’m going to give Dumbo three faceless roustabouts!

Burl reviews Looney Tunes: Back In Action! (2003)

NYAAAAAHHHHH, what’s up, pals? It’s me, Burl! I’d like to review a picture that I’ve just finally gotten around to watching, and that’s Joe Dante’s half-cartoon Looney Tunes: Back in Action! I’ve never been what you’d call a fan of half-cartoons, though I’ve seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Cool World and of course Evil Toons, which, like this picture, features the great Dick “Sorority Girl” Miller! (He could be the only actor to have ever starred in more than one of these half-cartoons, ha ha!) But I’ve never bothered with Space Jam, and probably never will!

Anyway, for whatever reason, I wasn’t the least bit interested in Looney Tunes: Back in Action when it came out, even though I was and am a big Joe Dante fan! Ha ha, after all, he made Piranha, The Howling, Explorers and Matinee, and has been known to sing the praises of Miller! It just seemed like a bit of Hollywood kids' nonsense! But I finally watched it, and thank goodness it was a lot more entertaining than I expected it would be!

That’s squarely because of Dante, I’d be willing to bet! Ha ha, he surely does bring along many of his cultural obsessions, and if you were to make a Venn diagram of Dante’s cultural obsessions and ol’ Burl’s, I think you’d find significant overlap there! Of course I’m not nearly the Warner Bros. cartoon fanatic he is, though I am a longtime and devoted casual consumer, so those aspects – the greater part of the movie, that is to say, ha ha – were not lost on me!

The story begins with tension between Daffy and Bugs, which has to be resolved at the executive level at Warner’s! Meanwhile, elsewhere on the lot, a lowly security guard wishes to become a stuntman, but fails miserably and upsets the actor he’s actually being played by, Brendan Fraser! Ha ha, the “real” Fraser is a mean man, and the security guard played by Fraser is a meek and humble stumblebum, who happens to be the son of the studio’s biggest action star, a James Bond type played by Pierce Brosnan who actually turns out to be a real superspy! He in turn is kidnapped by a psychotic nerd played by Steve Martin, and only Brendan Fraser, the “fake” one, not the “real” one, can save him!

Ha ha, are you following all this? Amid all this plot stuff, they do manage to shoehorn in the cartoon creations! Ha ha, there are plenty of jokes from these loveable characters, and just like in Roger Rabbit, there’s plenty of uproariousness mined from the collision of the physics of our world and that of the cartoon entities who operate by their own physical guidelines!

And then there’s Steve Martin, who gets generally frowned upon in the other reviews of this picture! But no frowning from ol’ Burl! No, his nasal performance, while slightly perplexing, is perfectly cartoonish, as befits the material! His wig is pretty great too! Ha ha, I like how he romances Mary Woronov! That’s a match made in some kind of crazy heaven!  

I know the movie didn’t turn out like Joe Dante wanted it to, and I firmly believe his version would have been much better! But there’s still plenty of entertainment here, a few laffs, and of course Dick Miller! That automatically makes it worth seeing, and I give this effort two Robot Monsters!

Burl reviews The Adventures of Tintin! (2011)

Hi, Burl here to review a cartoon movie from none other than Steven Spielberg! This is apparently his first cartoon, and it was done using a new technique quite different from the pen-and-ink styles employed by the late Walt Disney! The drawings here have a strangely lifelike look to them – but their close approximation of human appearance and movement almost comes to work against these drawings, as we are constantly reminded that they are not real precisely by the fact that they are so nearly!

The movie is The Adventures of Tintin, and I was very excited to see it as I have been a longtime fan of that world-famous young journalist-adventurer, who never writes or files a story, has no editor that we ever see, and yet seems to live very comfortably with his little dog Snowy, and enjoys endless leisure and worldwide travel! He’s really got it figured out, ha ha! I’d long thought how nice it would be to see a good live-action version of one of his adventures, so I was a little disappointed when I heard it was going to be a cartoon, but I guess it’s no big deal! A live action version would have had so many trick effects that it would have been something of a cartoon anyway like so many Hollywood action pictures these days!

The movie is a mash-up of three of the Tintin books, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Crab With the Golden Claws! Those aren’t bad choices, but I’d have liked The Black Island mixed with Tintin in Tibet, I think! Ha ha, one has an ape in a tam o’ shanter and the other has a big coconut-headed yeti! I think this Tintin movie has been a fairly sizable hit, so who knows, maybe we’ll get that down the line!

This story has the intrepid boy reporter getting mixed up in a mystery involving a model ship and, ultimately, a sunken treasure, ha ha, naturally! He meets a man destined to be his lifelong chum, the dipsomaniacal sea captain Haddock, and together, along with help from the inept Scotland Yarders Thomson and Thompson and the little white terrier Snowy, they battle a perfidious first mate and a piratical, devil-bearded malefactor along with all their attendant henchmen!

It’s been a while since Spielberg made one of these lighthearted action pictures, or at lease a while since I saw a new one of them, and now and again as I watched this picture I got a little ghost of the frissons I recall having back when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time! But only occasionally, and that’s in part because I’m now an adult, of course, and in part because there’s a kind of mechanical and rote aspect to the goings-on this time around! Some of the action scenes appear to have strange ellipses in them which the top-of-his-game Spielberg would never have allowed! During a big chase in an Arab town, for example, we see a tank driving along with a building stuck on top of it; but we never see the moment when the tank actually tried to drive through the building and became wedged, and then just pushed the building along with the Thom(p)sons inside! Ha ha, it’s a solid comedy action beat, or would have been, and SS is usually on those like a dog on chocolate!

That’s not the only example! There’s a bit of a “Yeah, yeah, here’s your Tintin movie” aspect to it, from the script on up! And Tintin has always been a fairly one-note fellow, but in a movie you might hope for a few little crenellations that expand upon but don’t undercut or alter the character too much! A difficult balance, I’m sure, but they might have at least given it a shot! Also, they steal at least one gag from Commando, and, ha ha, where’s Calculus anyway?

But it’s not a horrible movie or anything, just a sort of time-waster sprinkled with moments of excitement and adventure, but generally just sort of there! We get a couple of references to past Spielberg triumphs – Tintin’s ginger quiff poking above the water like a shark fin as he stealth-swims toward some villains, for example – but these somehow feel as though they were put in by different people, maybe while Spielberg was in the bathroom or something! I think it’s possible that Spielberg simply realized halfway through the process that he didn’t enjoy making cartoons after all, and that’s fine! Anyway, I give The Adventures of Tintin two blistering barnacles and am keeping my fingers crossed for a live-action Black Island adaptation!