Oh for the Love of Dog!

The Disney studios have crafted some pretty atrocious bits of celluloid lately, including about 75% of the films of Cuba Gooding. Mercifully he’s spared “Underdog”; I wish that we were.

It’s no surprise that an increasingly illiterate Hollywood would eventually latch onto one of the true bargain-basement animations for feature material, but the resulting film begs the question: why would any studio, much less Disney, make a feature based on a one-joke cartoon if it didn’t get the one joke?

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1964, when “Underdog” popped up on suburban TV screens. It was, simply, a rather lame and anemic parody of superhero toons, most notably the genre champ “Superman.” In this case, the hero’s alter ego was apparently named Humble and Lovable Shoe Shine Boy, and was voiced by the least macho actor in Hollywood: Mr. Milquetoast himself, Wally Cox. However, when he pops a vitamin pill(!), puts on the Spandex (in his case, extremely baggy Spandex) and starts flying around as Underdog, for some reason delivering almost all of his lines in rhymed couplets, he speaks with the voice of … Wally Cox. This could have been funny if someone like Mel Brooks got hold of it (which he did, a few years later, in another superhero parody, a live TV series called “Captain Nice”.) Similarly, the heroine, a news anchor named Sweet Polly Purebred, gets kidnapped and put into dire peril on a regular basis, and calls for help by singing a variant of the children’s song “Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?”

That’s it; that’s the sum total of the series, produced by something called Total Television and animated in Mexico by a minimalist studio apparently staffed by animators who didn’t make the cut for “Rocky & Bulwinkle.” The thing became something of a cult classic; would that it had stayed as such.

Now, we have a fancy-schmancy CG beagle zipping through the skies of some urban metropolis or other. The Alpha Dog is no longer an anthropomorphized Shoe Shine Boy; he’s a dog named Shoe Shine, who gets caught in a lab experiment gone wrong. (Why couldn’t he have been bitten by a radioactive flea and done a Spidey parody instead? Or would that have unduly taxed the trio of writers who cooked up this mess? The trio consist of two newbies and one guy whose major credit to date was “Zoom: Academy for Superheroes”; enough said. Director Frederick DuChau, meanwhile, helmed the 2005 CG critter movie “Racing Stripes”.)

Once again, we have millions of dollars worth of CG spent to resurrect a truly minor bit of cel animation. It’s like using a Ferrari sports car to pull a plow. It doesn’t get the job done and does the Ferrari more harm than good. Can Hollywood please, please consider its projects a bit more carefully next time?

And here's to you, Wilbur Robinson...

Let me get one thing off my chest right away. The Disney web site has the entire cast (pretty much) of its latest (and with any luck its last) non-Pixar CGI cartoon, Meet the Robinsons. First complaint is about the entire cast.

They're white.

All of them.

Normally, this is to be expected. Disney has always tended to ghettoize its minorities. Stick Fa Mulan in an all Chinese milieu, and nobody has to mention the fact that she's Asian. Create a movie set in Africa, with no Africans in it (actually, The Lion King and Tarzan both fall into this trap.) I had hopes that Lilo & Stitch would break the trend and showcase the ethnic diversity of the Hawaiian Islands. No such luck.

None in Meet the Robinsons, either. The Reverend Paul Mooney, a black stand-up comic, once led his audience through the theme song (well, barely a song) of The Jetsons. Everyone remembered the names of the wife, son, daughter, dog. But when he asked everyone to name the black family on The Jetsons, they had to realize: there was no family. The Utopian future has only white people in it.

Good one, Disney.

While this is potentially an interesting idea, which could have been used to the same kind of subversive political effect made in Monsters, Inc. (with its thinly-disguised attack on Enron), Disney here simply ends up repeating itself in the search by main character/science nerd Lewis for his biological family. So, given that the boy Lewis was put up for adoption some 12 years earlier, future by Wilbur Robinson shows up to take Lewis--back to the moment when he was deposited at the orphanage? No; on to the lily-white future. Finding the missing family is bad enough (Finding Nemo? Seen it...), but looking in the wrong place to understand Lewis's mom's reasoning is simply a bizarre choice.

The assembly of daffy relatives was done much better IMHO in You Can't Take It With You; this movie could have used some of that liberating spirit. As it is, it deserves a rating of UP-WTF.

Whose "Who's Who"?

The 1960s stage play The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley offered a rule of thumb about straight guys who dabble in gay sex: one time, you're curious; two times, you're going through a phase; three times or more, you like it. Without getting into that whole controversy, I'd like to borrow the format of the rule of thumb to apply it to Who's Who in Animated Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg:

If you make one serious error or omission, you may have just missed the data; two such errors or omissions, you have a blind spot; three or more times, and there is a serious problem with the author's agenda.

In this case, Lenburg has drastically short-changed anyone having anything to do with anime. Why does it matter? First of all, note that the title of his book does not read Who's Who in American Cartoons. He offers what's supposed to be a comprehensive look at animators, and where he chooses to be so, it is comprehensive. He's offered up plenty of ink on The Usual Suspects: Hanna and Barbera, Disney and the Nine Old Men, Bob Clampett, Paul Terry (of Terry-Toons), John Lasseter, even Ralph Bakshi. It's a pretty thick (360+ pages) book, and comprehensive as far as it goes.

Unfortunately, it refuses to go to Asia.

Of the major movers in anime, Lenburg profiles exactly two, and arguably these are the two that no author could ignore and still keep credibility: Osamu Tezuka and Hayao Miyazaki. The facts are accurate, as far as they go, and the Tezuka entry alludes to the Kimba/Simba controversy.

The Miyazaki entry omits one fact, but it's a fact as big as a Totoro, and its omission is one of the major clues that Lenburg has a curious tunnel-vision when it comes to anime. The Miyazaki entry mentions that Howl's Moving Castle was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature; yet the entry fails to mention that Spirited Away actually won an Oscar! It was only the second animated movie to do so; yet, Lenburg, who pretty much lists every Oscar nominee who ever was, win or lose, happened to forget this one.

He also forgot that there were more than two significant anime masters. You won't find entries at all for the major names. Katsuhiro Otomo? Alluded to in the Tezuka entry. Isao Takahata? Alluded to in the Miyazaki entry. Yoshiyuki Tomino, the Gundam creator? Not here. Satoshi Kon? Missing in action. The late great Yoshifumi Kondo, whose mastery of facial expressions added to all the Studio Ghibli masterpieces, including his sole direction credit Whisper of the Heart? Fuhgeddaboudit. Rin Taro? Osamu Dezaki? Makoto Shinkai? No. No. No.

After a while, you have to wonder if there's a deliberate animus against Asian (or at least Japanese) animators hard-wired into the book. To be fair, a few are mentioned, but you pretty much have to page through the book to find guys like Koji Yamamura, who was nominated for an Oscar for Animated Short in 2003 (the year Spirited Away won).

Just as interesting, though, are the Asian-American animators who get short shrift. Jimmy Murakami (of Murakami Wolf Studios) gets a sizable entry, although it completely fails to mention his studio's contribution of animation to the Frank Zappa film 200 Motels. And, to be fair, some Western animators are unfairly dissed: the entry for Richard Williams fails to mention his magnum opus, the feature film Watership Down.

The biggest sin of omission, though, is the failure to mention Bob Kuwahara. This man (1901-1964) immigrated to America as a kid, worked for 5 years at Disney and 5 at MGM before doing time in an internment camp after Pearl Harbor. He went to Terry-Toons in 1950 and created a series of shorts about a Japanese mouse named Hashimoto (which may be the first time the word "ninjutsu" was ever uttered on American television--so there, Naruto!) Yet, the only mention of Hashimoto is under another Terry-Toons animator, Arthur Bartsch, who directed one episode; nothing about the guy who wrote and directed most of the other 13 episodes.

Mister Lenburg, for future editions of the book, you may want to learn the word "google." The truth, as they used to say, is out there; your book just needs to find it.

And then there was "Skyland"

What can one say about "Skyland," yet another attempt to bring western-produced animation that tries to look like anime.

To quote Groucho Marx: it's trying. Very trying.

"Skyland" looks like a beta demo of a very derivative computer game. The artwork looks totally unfinished on the characters. The backgrounds are pretty, but they're also wide-open vistas that don't exactly have to emote.

The dialogue? Sounds like it was borrowed from all six "Star Wars" movies. These characters don't have to emote, either.

These days animators have the time, money, talent and software to get it right; so why do they keep missing the target? Or, in the case of "Skyland," miss the room the target is in?

Annie May, Anyone?

That's my name, anyway, for anime-wannabes produced in the west. There have been a few, some with better provenance than others. The Powerpuff Girls were a deliberate parody, and have even been recycled in Japan into something resembling anime. (See pic on left)

IGPX is a co-production between Cartoon Network and Production I.G., but you can pretty much tell which side of the scale is heavier.


Two series are fairly high up on the Annie May scale. Avatar, The Last Airbender may seem to be the best crossover candidate with its blatantly Asian (Chinese-ish) setting. The main problem is that this series still holds back at crucial moments. There are some attempts at taking emotional depth to anime standards, and a few scenes come close. However, there's still the built-in cultural bias against animation; repeat after me: it's a medium for kids. This gets in the way, and the script defaults to the wisecracks often found in modern toons. They might as well rename Sakka The Sidekick as Han Solo: he even quotes one of Han's lines, "I couldn't let you steal all the glory."

But the closest we've gotten to anime is, oddly enough, Nickelodeon's Kappa Mikey. Yes, the art generally sucks, but that actually becomes less important as we realize we're watching a series clearly inspired by madcap Japanese comedies like Excel Saga and BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo.

Kappa Mikey is the story of the cast of a TV series about superheroes, collectively known as LilyMu. Basically a nerdy guy, two girls, an alien and a kinda-pokemon critter, they have to deal with the head of the network (who comes across like a wierd mix of Ted Turner and Mr. Sulu from Star Trek), his fawning flunkie, bizarre fans, and anything else the writers can dream up. And those dreams can get pretty interesting. In one episode, LilyMu becomes a rock band (they can't play music; they just rip off ringtones); they get called on it and challenged to a Battle of the Bands by a real group (bearing a distinct resemblance to Puffy AmiYumi). Best touch: the host of the Battle sounds like Joan Rivers but looks like Yubaba the witch in Spirited Away.

Put all this together with their tendency to go Super-Deformed at a moment's notice, and add bumpers featuring dancing sushi(!), and you have the closest to anime we've hit yet, and it's tasty! Enjoy!

Oscar Animation: Quantity over Quality

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences--the overly grand name for the folks in the film biz who congratulate themselves each year by handing out Oscars--have already put forth the list of 16 potential films for the Academy's consideration for the 2007 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The sheer number of contenders (which is still provisional) hasn't been this high since the 2003 awards, in which the Oscar went to Hayao Miyazaki's sumptuous classic Spirited Away.

2007 looks like more of the same: The quantity is there, but as for the quality...

Let's see what we have. The Ant Bully, Happy Feet, Arthur and the Invisibles, Barnyard, Cars, The Wild, Curious George, Everyone’s Hero, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Flushed Away, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Open Season, A Scanner Darkly, Renaissance, and Paprika.

Sixteen features, and, let's be honest: did you actually want to see any of them?

That Disney is represented by Cars and The Wild shows just how far the studio has sunk from its glory days. Some of the films are not only dreck, but almost identical dreck: The Wild, Open Season, Over the Hedge, Barnyard.

Only three of the films at least try to push the envelope; A Scanner Darkly and Renaissance, though, basically work the same territory with heavy rotoscoping.

If there were any justice in Hollywood, the Oscar would go to the only film of the bunch with the creativity to qualify as art and science: Paprika. The latest feature by Satoshi Kon, creator of Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paranoia Agent, continues his playing around with perception, blurring the lines between reality and illusion, the objective and the subjective. This time, science creates yet another labor-saving device. This one, however, plugs into a mental patient's thoughts, in hopes of uncovering the deep-seated problem.

It's not just Kon's visuals, which are among the best in the business, or the fact that the coolly logical scientist and her alter-ego Paprika are voiced by anime character goddess Megumi Hayashibara. But the other films, for the most part, have given up. They're content to pitch the pre-pubescent set, expecting that the next generation will glom onto the old.

A Bit Late, But...

Last month Yoshiyuki Tomino came to town: Chicago, to appear as part of the Chicago International Film Festival and screen the trilogy of Z Gundam movies.

Tomino himself is bald, with black bushy eyebrows, and resembled the dust jacket photos of Zen monk D.T. Suzuki. When he spoke through an interpreter, it seemed at times as if he finally had a chance to get stuff off of his chest; at other times, he held back, although hinting at his opinions. He said, for example, that he didn't want to say anything about Dr. Osamu Tezuka, his first employer and mentor; later, though, he allowed that Tezuka's consistent optimism was a problem for him. (Of course, Tezuka himself gave up that optimism later in life, but that's beside the point.)

No earth-shaking revelations, except at the post-panel-discussion dinner at Lawry's. (Can someone tell me what's supposed to be so great about prime rib? Fish is fish and cow is cow, to me...) He finished off his remarks by saying "I hope the three great religions of the world can come together in peace. Of course, that may all be science fiction." As one of the major creators of 20th century sci-fi, I guess he'd know.