Zootropolis (aka Zootopia)
Cert: PG / 108 mins / Dir. Rich Moore, Jared Bush & Byron Howard / Trailer
First things first: I enjoyed this movie. Although for Disney, it's a bit of a mess. We don't get a separate short-film at the start, as has become tradition with The Mouse's flagship animated offerings, there's no cute after-credits scene, and even though we're relatively close to the US release date, the audiences in the UK get the movie re-titled for no discernible reason. For an Easter-release, this sure feels like an afterthought.
And I don't want to start on a downer (largely because I'm going to end on one), because this is a very likeable movie with very admirable goals. The animation's gorgeous (and the teams have even found a way to showcase all their environments within the first ten minutes), the voice-acting matches the characters (Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman are perfect) and it's peppered with very funny gags which work over various age-levels. But I think the script is way tighter than the story, and individual moments stand out more than the finished movie. The sloth-scene for example is even longer than the trailer-version, and even funnier for it. Although much like a similar sequence in Hail, Caesar!, I could feel the patience of the audience starting to wear. Which just made it funnier for me, to be honest. And within the film's opening scene alone, a school play which features a young cheetah dressed in a tiger costume because he's playing a predator-archetype is already smarter writing than anything in Norm of the North.
But as much fun as I had, the movie just doesn't quite sit together the way you know it should. I suspect it's another example of Disney setting the bar too high for themselves, and the end-result is oddly non-committal. Zootropolis isn't as incisive as Inside Out, as dynamic as Big Hero 6 or as earnestly emotional as Frozen. The problem could well be that the central themes of prejudice, social cohesion and integration are too heavy for a film of this type, even for the mighty hand of Disney. While it never becomes as patronising as the other film about talking animals I watched this weekend, there's a lot of skimming and simplification going on the closer the film skirts to areas of personal belief. The fact that the closing monologue of the film openly admits as much does nothing to alter the 'eager to offer a message, desperate not to offend' tip-toeing we've just seen.
Last things last: then again, the problem could just be that the film has two directors, one co-director, two screen-writers and seven story-writers. This many cooks certain't don't spoil the broth, but their presence explains why it's so uneven...
Despite me comparing it unfavourably, Inside Out.
Only if you desperately want the 3D (which is fine, as it usually is with animation).
Not as much as I'd like, and not as much as the creators would like, either.
It'll be a good first-step for your young padawans, though.
Cast? Difficult to tell as they're also great in live-action.
Director? Difficult to tell as there are so many of them…
Nope.
Not that I heard.
Level 1: ZooWhatever features the voice of Alan Tudyk, who will be appearing in Star Wars: Rogue One later this year.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
I'm not really a fan of Johnny Cash as such*1, not really a fan of old-Country, and not really a fan of music biopics if I'm being honest. With that in mind, I didn't think that 2005's Walk The Line would really be for me. And, as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, my insight served me well. It's not that I wasn't open to being swayed by James Mangold's portrayal of the man-in-black, but more that it just didn't convince me anyway.
The film starts slightly awkwardly, if traditionally for a biopic, but gains its footing as it goes, covering Cash's early life from his childhood on an Arkansas cotton-farm, through his military service and into the music industry. The problem I had is that the storytelling is probably too traditional for its own good, and the further it goes the more pleased with itself it becomes, and more mawkish as a result.
Walk The Line may be a two and a half hour journey, but it spans 24 years, resulting in The Exposition Express stopping only at the major stations along the way for some explanatory dialogue, red-letter events and origin-stories of The Hits. One of the pitfalls of this sort of thing, of course, is ensuring that your recurring characters age appropriately over the course of the film (cf Jersey Boys), and it was so challenging in this particular film that 20th Century Fox decided best not to bother, leaving Mummy (Shelby Lynne) and Daddy (Robert Patrick) Cash in perpetual middle-age, with only Lynne's hairstyles illustrating the passage of time.
It also probably didn't help matters that I'm only casually familiar with Cash's back-catalogue, so the heavily-telegraphed moments which feature the genesis of those songs didn't cause the tingle that James Mangold intended. In fact, he may as well have been standing in the background with a placard reading 'this is that song you know'. In many cases they're interesting, but they take the place of actually hearing the song being performed in their familiar way.
Walk The Line is a whistle-stop biography that does little to win new fans for the man in black. Despite the scattergun chronology, there are some damned fine performances in there. They're just damned fine performances of characters the film had already convinced me not to like.
And when a biography of a singer makes the viewer like him less than when they'd started watching..?
Nope, really not.
Not particularly, if I'm being honest (although you may have already gathered that).
I'd recommend it to people who enjoy watching afternoon true story tv-movies about unlikeable protagonists.
There isn't.
Joaquin Phoenix lent his voice to the 2003 Disney animated film, Brother Bear, as did Mr Greg Proops, who voiced Podrace commentator Fode in The Phantom Menace as well as Death Watch sympathiser Tal Merrick in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
*1 And yeah, the obvious retort is 'well if you're not a fan, what were you expecting to get out of the film?'. While it's true that I'm not a fan, I'm not not a fan, either. Walk The Line is the equivalent of introducing someone to your friend for the first time, then telling them stories of the times your friend was an aimless, substance-abusing (but highly successful) egotist. There's humanity in Phoenix's performance, but very little warmth.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
