Disney: Best and Worst

Since 1939 Walt Disney Pictures has built a formidable reputation of producing quality family feature films. But in its legacy of achievement, there have also been failures. Here are my pick of the best and worst Disney movies.

Aladdin earns third place in the Disney greats. What stands out from this film is the sizzling aesthetic vision of Agrabah, with its pungent, oriental essence of the Arabian Nights, mixed with a strong, hilarious screenplay and voice acting. A manifestation of the reasons Disney is so well-regarded today, this movie is a Cave of Wonders to the child in all of us.

Second best in my list is Beauty and the Beast. This won a Golden Globe for Best Film as well as a nomination for Best Film at the Academy Awards – a previously unachieved feat for an animated movie. With its deft characterisation, classic songs and groundbreaking use of CGI in the ballroom scene, it deserves that recognition.

And the greatest Disney film award goes to - of course - The Lion King. Hans Zimmer, Elton John and Tim Rice’s score and soundtrack are standalone exquisite triumphs, from the soaring, Swahili-inspired brilliance of The Circle of Life, to the award-winning, mellifluous Can You Fell the Love Tonight. This is blended with a stirring storyline (a homage to Hamlet) and a bundle of likeable characters, including Jeremy Iron’s sassy love-to-hate villain Scar, Roan Atkinson’s uncanny anthropomorphism in Zazu, and the sensational double act of Timon and Pumba.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Pocahontas 2 gets the dishonour of third worst Disney movie. I seriously advise anyone to avoid this if you have a smidgeon of respect for the first film. The sheer audacity of Disney to smear Pocahontas with a more realistic and cynical storyline is beyond words. A pop to the proverbial bubble of childhood  - nay, a punch to the face - which Disney so beautifully encapsulates with its essentially escapist fantasies. Why did you do this to us? Why!

Second most abysmal is High School Musical 3. While the whole franchise is pretty terrible, the first two deigned to have catchy songs and a vague stab at ‘plotline’. This third shambles embodies the cheesiness and atrocious ‘acting’ of its predecessors while lacking in any of the wit, intelligence or nuance of previous generation’s Disney films. It seems like the Jedward of movies – so bad you have to watch it just to realise your preconceived expectations of how bad it will be.

And – drumroll - the worst of Disney’s disasters is: Beverly Hills Chihuahua. As if the title isn’t enough to put any sane person off this train-crash slice of cinematic embarrassment, predictably the content is meagre to say the least. It wounds the soul to think that the producer of so many classics conceived an idea so vacuous, so offensive, as a film about the commodification of small dogs as fashion items, not to mention its awkward racial stereotyping of Mexicans. The worst thing about this debacle? They made a second and third. 

Low Budget vs High Budget Film

If you’re a film aficionado like myself, you may be aware of a sense of competition between big-budget Hollywood films and lower budget, more independently produced features. Even if you just enjoy the odd flick on Netflix, it’s worth knowing what your well-earned student wonga can buy.

So: high budget or low budget?

For low budget we’re talking under $50 million. If that figure sounds like a lot to you, a million is nothing in blockbuster terms, I promise. World War Z, the zombie-genre monolith Hollywood churned out this summer, cost just under $200 million.

In past years the Hollywood machine created a formula for making maximum profit. Throwing money at a project that is A: pre-sold (I.e. it was already a best-selling book, TV series, or in Battleship’s case, a board game) and B: CGI-tastic – that is, there are a lot of explosions (any Michael Bay film) –  have proven in the past to make the most turnover.

But budget doesn’t necessarily determine how good a film is going to be. With no due respect Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End had an estimated $300 million budget and isn’t likely to be winning any awards. Meanwhile critical successes such as the $32,000 Fish Tank – which won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2009- will most likely never make a profit.

Equally, a big budget film isn’t necessarily a Hollywood-backed project. Last year’s Cloud Atlas was extremely high budget but all the funding was independent – the directing siblings the Wachowski’s even put in their own money for lack of backing.

Low budget films first emerged as B Movies. Back in the day, these were the lesser part of a double-feature screening. Less money and talent was afforded to these projects than the A Movie blockbuster, but this soon developed into a genre of its own. By the sixties B Movies were exploring more vulgar subject matters, such as sex and violence. These films broke so many cultural taboos, pushing not only censorship boundaries with their gore and soft pornography, but also were a platform of social radicalisation. For instance, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) still stands as a sci-fi classic, having been said to inspire Night of the Living Dead (1968) which was groundbreaking in being one of the first films to have a black male lead (Duane Jones).

Low Budget movies also tend to push the boundaries of style in filmmaking. Because they might not have the money, filmmakers are forced to be more creative. In The Fountain, for lack of funding, Darren Aronofsky used microscopic shots of underwater organisms to mimic a dying star. X-rated blaxploitation jaw-drapper Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) not only pushed boundaries with its content (unsimulated sex, racism) but with its precocious style – a whirl of jump-cuts and fast paced editing.

If you’re feeling for a classic this October 31^st, Halloween was made on only a $320,000 budget and still stands as a consummate slasher horror movie. What’s more, The Rocky Horror Picture Show not only surpassed the ‘line’ but redefined it. This extravagant, trippy movie is a plethora of sex, cross-dressing, cannibalism and sci-fi which has earned an intense cult fanbase.

But recently Hollywood has upped its game, with some exciting prospects on the horizon. The consistently brilliant Coen brothers have a new project:  Inside Llewelyn Davis. Marvel’s Avenger’s spin-off Thor: The Dark World is out soon (8^th November) and it looks impressive. Whereas the generic blockbuster can be bad (Transformers,anyone?), with a good director at the helm the result can be successful. Joss Whedon recently wowed the world with The Avengers, a sheer explosion of fighting, wittiness and epic. If you’re not a superhero fanatic I would recommend you take a look at something like Woody Allen’s latest Blue Jasmine.

Ultimately, it depends what you’re looking for in a film. Personally I like both – while blockbusters are generally light relief and entertainment, lower budget films tend to make you think and can even make an impact on the world around them. Moreover if the people in charge of a film are more interested in the art itself than any money the project makes – your Tarantinos, Coens and Whedons – you generally can expect a worthwhile cinematic experience.

Cloud Atlas

Adapted from the best-selling novel by David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas is a poignant, sprawling piece of cinema. Showcasing Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in its start-spattered cast, the film follows multiple narrative trajectories across time – from the 1840s to the 22^nd century.

The Wachowskis (The Matrix Trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) deserve recognition as directors who adapted the seemingly impossible to adapt book to movie form, when Hollywood seemed to have given up hope. Whereas the book begins telling each story separately, the film splices them into parallel narratives, inter-editing each tale together in a jumpy, chaotic mash-up which actually seems to work.

Cloud Atlas has been criticised for its frenetic editing between the stories. Admittedly it takes time to get used to this flitting, sporadic storytelling, but – with an open mind - it’s not difficult to follow. In fact, this innovative form alone is striking. At its Lord of the Rings length of almost three hours, you have to be willing to dedicate yourself to the story. The film demands a re-watch to fully appreciate its complexities. But the pay-off is terrific, both emotionally, philosophically and on an entertainment basis.

From Jim broadbent’s character’s comedic Mission-Impossible-esque escape from an old folks’ home to a clone fighting an evil regime in a nightmarish future Korea, there are plentiful laughs and thrills here. But the story will not only get you hooked with its originality, intrigue and action - it will make you think. The narrative explores how a person’s lifetime is affected by those who lived before, and the causality and momentum one life can have on those in the future. Each story is connected by themes of oppression, revolution and liberation.

There is also a recurring idea of reincarnation. Many actors play multiple characters – most interestingly (and difficult to spot) perhaps is Halle Berry’s portrayal of a Korean man – and this is suggestive of the same soul passing through different lives, improving, loving, losing, and seeking meaning.

 Cloud Atlas is high concept cinema which deserves patience and commitment. A thought provoking, beautiful film, I cannot implore you to watch this enough.

World War Z

If you've ever played the game 'plague' on your phone, just imagine that combined with black ops zombies and -TADA!- you have World War Z. This is not necessarily a bad combination. WWZ is a behemoth action extravaganza which will command attention amidst other summer blockbusters, overpowering them with its brazen billiondollar-ness. Brad Pitt's love-child, the scale of this thing is formidable, but it is nothing new.

Although you could have guessed it, WWZ is all about poor Brad Pitt trying to save the world from the dreaded zombie. He must travel to the furthest reaches of the globe (including the forbidden, treacherous and enigmatic land of Wales) to Save the Day and get back to his family. What a bleeding hero. 

I mentioned Black Ops, because I found WWZ, unlike the book (although I could start every sentence of this review with that phrase) awkwardly patriotic. At times it gets a little cheesy, with the US Army constantly saving the day. A scene when Brad Pitt is being escorted by a swat team to an aeroplane is a lot like COD with the use of headsets, the xbox shots and general mise-en-scene. The ending was actually rewritten and re-shot and this stunted structure is evident. Reminiscent of Any Action Film in The Eighties or Nineties, Brad Pitt walks solo down a corridor to save the day. It's so cringey I half expected the American National Anthem to start blasting into the cinema. The closing sequences attempt to moralise the situation because there of course has to be a message, and that is okay, it's just that it's done pretty poorly here. 

I know this is a small point but I found the family pretty annoying, unbearable and frankly unpatriotic at times. Brad's kids were having inconvenient asthma attacks the whole time, undoing their seatbelts in a speeding car to dive (FOR A BLANKET might I add) at the floor and thus cause Pitt to crash, not to mention the wife phoning up for a natter when it is paramount Jerry remains silent else he be attacked by Zombies. Come on guys, where's the do-it-for America spirit here? Be obedient for your country, god damn it. I felt like they all needed a good slap in the face from Ron Weasley, followed by a lecture on sorting out their priorities. Honestly, if those eleven year olds had their shit together in Hogwarts battling an evil wizard, you can too.  

On the bright side WWZ occasionally counters these shortcomings. While gore is subdued for the much debated audience-enhancing PG-13, terror takes centre stage here. The use of 3D is genuinely justified and effective, taken full advantage of in jumpy moments and sensationally vivid in sequences such as the memorable zombie-wall-climbing scene. Rabid editing and frenzied handheld dizzies and captivates (although you might wonder if a zombie had stolen the camera) whilst celebrating the notion that no scene is shot more epically than with a helicopter shot, and by that thesis WWZ sticks heavily to. 

Director Mark Foster capitalizes on the vibe which infuses End of the World flicks  28 Days Later and I am Legend. Yes, these films are infinitely superior, but the running zombie/rabid human antagonist is present here. Zombie purists (like Max Brooks, the guy whose book this is based on...oops) maintain that they cannot and must not be able to run. However this skill surely gives an added sense of terror to Z... what could be worse than a man-eating human which walks slowly but cannot die? Um, one which sprints. This addition creates a dimension of threat unlike the dominating force of the zombie-genre The Walking Dead, which is perhaps why they deviated from the book in this sense. Chases and mass-attacks are all the more exhilarating with the insectile, running zombie, making up for a lack of physical horror.  

World War Z is a blundering yet impressive rollercoaster of a film, with all the visuals, immediacy and sensation to incite an adrenaline rush. You will enjoy this film, probably look over your shoulder a lot more after your viewing, but you'll have forgotten it by next year.