A Disney Day

[lampbane]

I guess I'll write a longer post/review on Tron: Legacy later. It's a fun, though flawed movie.

Yesterday we went through a spate of movies from Netflix:

Bolt: I remember when the commercials started airing for this back in 2008, and my boss said the hamster was probably going to be the best part of the movie. Well, that's kind of true. And the sad part is that there isn't even that much hamster. It's not a bad movie, but in a lot of ways it's very flat. I did like the parts when Bolt was being a dog and the pigeons were funny. Ultimately I prefer Meet the Robinsons, even though that one got worse reviews. Maybe it's because that was a science fiction film with a misfit kid, two subjects dear to my heart.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice: This is a really stupid movie. Despite that, I enjoyed it. I mostly wanted to see it because it was actually filmed in New York, and we kept seeing the filming notices in Midtown. heehaw_tng was so excited when we got to the part where Balthazar parks his car outside Bryant Park. The movie kind of made New York look magical and I liked that. It's just that the movie was very exposition-heavy and its plot was overcomplicated to the point of ridiculous, and it's hard not to groan at Nicholas Cage's line delivery at times. Jay Baruchel was good, though. (Also loved the Drake character, mostly for the M:tG props in his office.)

Waking Sleeping Beauty: We capped off the evening with this documentary about when Eisner and Katzenberg were brought in to turn Disney around, and how that affected the animation department and brought on the Disney Renaissance. Unfortunately, the film was merely good and not great. The style of the documentary was interesting because they chose to draw solely from archival footage (including a clip from Jeopardy and a rage-inducing Diane Sawyer interview). But in terms of the stories they chose to tell it was severely lacking. They told us Disney was in trouble but really didn't go into why; we know that Don Bluth decimated the animation team but they don't really go into how it hurt the department, just that it did. You learn more about that period from watching The Pixar Story, which even uses some of the same footage. The film has an in-depth look at the making of The Little Mermaid, but they really skim through everything else so it feels kind of empty. What the film really did do well was showcase the contributions of Howard Ashman. I originally just thought of him as a talented lyricist before, but this documentary shows how much he designed these films, in terms of story structure and emotional content. A documentary just on Ashman and his contributions to the three Disney films he worked on would have been stupendous. However, this was still worth watching, if only for the home movies.

Two other recently-released Disney documentaries are available on Netflix streaming, The Boys and Walt and El Grupo, so I'll have to check them out.

Also, watching Bolt means I'm closer to my goal of having seen every one of the Disney "canon" animated features, which I've been working on since I got Netflix seven years ago. All I have left are the "package" features, like Make Mine Music and Fun and Fancy Free, which I've seen parts of but never the entire thing. Finally, everything's on Netflix (DVD, not streaming) now, so I should be done sometime in 2011.