The Disney Golden Age (1937-1942)

In 1934, Walt Disney Productions, today known as Walt Disney Animation Studios, announced production on their very first feature-length animated motion picture.  As of this writing, the studio has produced an official total of 54 feature films, with two slated for release in 2016.

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
Released 4 February 1938 (Premiered 21 December 1937)
Directed by David Hand (supervising director), William Cottrell (sequence director), Wilfred Jackson (sequence director), Larry Morey (sequence director), Perce Pearce (sequence director) & Ben Sharpsteen (sequence director)
Featuring the Voices of: Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Matraw, Billy Gilbert, Moroni Olsen, Harry Stockwell, Stuart Buchanan
83 minutes
Based on"Schneewittchen" (English: "Snow White") from Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812) by The Brothers Grimm
It's difficult to overstate the importance and impact of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS on film and western culture altogether; it a seminal moment in American culture and pop art history.  It is a big freaking deal.  Contrary to popular belief, it was not actually the first ever fully animated feature film.  El Apostol, or, "The Apostle", an Argentine satire, was released in 1917, but no surviving copies of it are believed to exist, and the oldest known surviving animated feature film is Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, or "The Adventures of Prince Achmed", a German film animated with silhouette puppets moved frame by frame.  SNOW WHITE was the first American animated feature film however, and the first feature-length traditionally-animated film.  That's not necessarily what makes it so remarkable in the landscape of film and the cultural zeitgeist however.  It's important because it was like nothing that had ever been seen before, in a way that has reverberated throughout popular media, laying groundwork for modern fantasy films, color filmmaking, the musical format and more.
Based on "Schneewittchen", aka "Snow White", the German fairy tale collected in Grimms' Fairy Tales, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS centers around what is at once a ridiculously inconsequential and shallow conflict and yet also one of the most universal and timeless conflicts in the human experience: the yielding of the elder generation to the younger.  Princess Snow White (voiced in a comically high-pitched falsetto by teenage actress Adriana Caselotti) maintains her cheerful demeanor despite being forced to work as a lowly scullery maid by her vain and wicked stepmother, the Queen (voiced by Lucille La Verne).  The Queen fears the day that Snow White's beauty will exceed her own and every day inquires of the Slave in the Magic Mirror (voiced by Moroni Olsen), "Magic Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?", and on the day that the Slave of the Mirror answers with "Snow White", the Queen is incensed to look down at the courtyard where the princess is being courted by a young prince (voiced by Harry Stockwell).  The Queen conspires to have Snow White murdered, but the girl escapes into the dark forest and discovers a little cottage, home to seven dwarfs who mine for jewels in the mountains nearby.  The leader of the dwarfs is the blustering and pompous Doc (voiced by Roy Atwell), who often clashes with the cantankerous woman-hater, Grumpy (voiced by Pinto Colvig, noted as the voiced of Goofy).  There's also Happy (voiced by Otis Harlan), Sleepy (also voiced by Colvig), Bashful (voiced by Scotty Mattraw), Sneezy (voiced by Billy Gilbert), and last but not least, Dopey.  The dwarfs, with the exception of Grumpy, welcome Snow White in, but the Queen is still dissatisfied as long as a rival to her beauty lives, so she transforms herself into a hideous old crone as a disguise and prepares a poisoned apple to eliminate the princess.
SNOW WHITE doesn't deviate very far from the Grimms' version, except in the ending, which is changed drastically, borrowing directly from the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty".  In the Grimms' fairy tale, Snow White is revived when the bite from the poisoned apple is dislodged from her throat.  Snow White and the Prince then marry and invite the Queen to the wedding feast, where she is fitted with red-hot shoes made of iron and forced to dance to death.  There's a number obvious reasons why this ending was replaced in favor of the "Love's First Kiss", partly because it's not a very neat resolution, but also because it's not only inappropriate for family audiences, but altogether sadistic by 20th-century sensibilities.  Walt Disney actually had grander plans for the story, pitching it as a battle between good and evil, with the prince playing a more prominent role in the story, but time and budget constraints, as well as the great difficulty the animators found in trying to create their first handsome, human male lead, resulted in those elements being cut.  Storyboards exist depicting the subplot involving the prince who is imprisoned and taunted by the Queen, a scene that was later put to use in Disney 1959 animated feature SLEEPING BEAUTY.
The constraints applied to SNOW WHITE are occasionally evident, such as slips or shortcuts in the animation, but there's a sense of discovery in it as the Disney studio develops a new art form.  The Disney animators had begun trying their pencils at animation that transcended traditional "cartooning" with their animated shorts in preparation for their big feature film debut, including "The Goddess of Spring", in which they attempted a realistically beautiful female character (with mixed results), and "The Old Mill", in which they experimented with the brand-new multiplane camera that created three-dimensional, multi-layered animation, but they're still racing against the clock to perfect something more than a feature-length cartoon, an animated motion picture.  Animation of Snow White and especially the Prince is still a little rough at times, but Art Babbit's animation of the Queen creates a commanding and regal presence.  The really juicy material for the animators is in the dwarf characters, actual cartoon characters with clearly defined comic personalities and quirks.  The breakout character of SNOW WHITE was Dopey, the mute, beardless dwarf whose mannerisms were largely inspired by comedian Harpo Marx, and as Walt described in the original 1937 preview, "He's nice, but sort of silly."  Of course, Dopey is the comic showpiece of the movie, providing lots of opportunities for comic side misadventures, including a memorable struggle with a slippery bar of soap, but the real highlight of the septet is Grumpy.  Grumpy is the unexpected heart of the seven dwarfs, initially loathing of Snow White, but gradually coming around to the point that when he has to hide his face and cry when the dwarfs hold vigil for her, he garners the most audience sympathy.  Plus his muscular buttock action at that pipe organ is incredible.
The movie is clearly a stepping stone between Disney's animated shorts and something more "legitimate", taking a very simple story and using much of the 83 minute run time on gags involving the dwarfs and animals typical of cartoon shorts, such as when the dwarfs first return to their cottage to find it cleaned by Snow White, or as they sleep around the cottage, while branching out into something more atmospheric.  The visuals of SNOW WHITE are lush and artistically ambitious, reminiscent of European storybooks around that time, with ornate designs on the margins, like the woodwork and furnishings around the dwarfs' cottage, or the zodiac that borders the Magic Mirror.  Many scenes, especially involving the Queen's castle, as well as Snow White's flight through the forest with its frightening hallucinations, are directly influenced by German Expressionist cinema like the films of F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, with the use of shadows and hallucinogenic imagery.
Disney has often been criticized for "dumbing down" fairy tales and folklore to appeal to a wider, American audience and children in particular, rounding out the rough edges and presenting a deceptive fantasy world in pursuit of a happy ending.  This is fair to some degree, and the gender politics of SNOW WHITE are undoubtedly troubling, as Snow White is easily the most passive character in her own story, singing "Someday My Prince Will Come", cooking and cleaning for the dwarfs happily while she literally waits for her Prince Charming to whisk her away to her "happily ever after".  It's not a helpful lesson for young girls, but it's at least somewhat defensible in that the story is a pure fantasy that works on a plane above the simple story, as a metaphor relevant to the common man in Depression era America when the movie was released.  For many people, there was little that could be done, and they were forced to trust that their faith and devotion would eventually payoff.  When the Prince awakens Snow White from her spell, and she kisses each of the dwarfs goodbye, he takes her away to a luminescent castle that appears to be nestled among the clouds.  Although it has been theorized, even as early as when the film was first released in 1938 (after a 1937 premiere), that the Prince's castle in the sky is a metaphor for heaven, I have my doubts.  However, it seems to implicate a higher form of reward than something merely temporal, and contrasts with the Queen's clearly earthbound castle.  There's more than meets the eye.
In terms of softening out the rough edges, there isn't much argument for keeping the Grimms' unnecessarily sadistic end of the Queen, but SNOW WHITE is only the first of many examples of a Disney classic that goes a lot darker than some people might remember.  As aforementioned, elements of the film's style were directly influenced by German Expressionist films, horror in particular, and some moments are very Gothic in tone and imagery.  A popular (unconfirmed) rumor holds that when the movie played at Radio City Music Hall in 1938, many of the seats had to have the upholstery replaced after being ruined by children so frightened that they lost bladder control, and whether or not that's accurate, the movie was noted for being potentially too scary for child audiences.  When it was initially released in the UK, the British Board of Film Censors classified it at an 'A' (out of "U - Universal", "A - Adult", and "H - Horror"), advising, and in some regions requiring, that children below a certain age be accompanied by an adult.  More than frightening, however, the movie is atmospheric, and one of the best scenes is when the Queen descends into her creepy laboratory, after being informed by the Magic Mirror that the carved-out heart she believes to be Snow White is actually that of a pig.  Concocting a potion to transform herself into a wretched old hag, the transformation scene is specifically inspired by a similar scene in Rouben Mamoulian's Frederic March-starring 1931 horror adaptation, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, and makes use of the recently-invented multiplane camera to create the disorienting, swirling effect when the Queen first drinks the combination of mummy dust, black of night, an old hag's cackle, a scream of fright, a blast of wind and a thunderbolt.
During production, the cost of the film soared multiple times over the initial estimate of $250,000 to what was then an unheard of sum of $1.48 million, for which Walt had to return to his creditors with a rough cut of the unfinished film to ask for more money, in addition to mortgaging his own house.  Some members of the press proclaimed it "Disney's Folly", a proclamation that couldn't have been more wrong and which neither Walt or his studio would never forget to mention when recalling the film, even though the prevalence of the sentiment was hardly widespread at the time of the film's release, as so much emphasis would suggest.  Disney had wowed the world many times already with the first sound cartoons and Mickey Mouse, color cartoons and the Silly Symphony series, and SNOW WHITE was eagerly anticipated by most.  However, the response was jubilation beyond what anyone could have expected, receiving uninhibited praise from audiences and critics alike, even becoming the highest-grossing film ever made with $6.5 million in its initial run (the record would be usurped shortly thereafter in 1940 by GONE WITH THE WIND).  Walt poured much of that revenue into his studio, even constructing a lavish, considerably larger new studio while beginning development on numerous new animated features, but soon, with the advent of World War II and a studio strike, Walt would discover that he could scarcely afford his plans.  In 1944, in desperate need of revenue, the studio released SNOW WHITE back into theaters, and once again saved Walt's studio.  Today, it's the 10th highest-grossing film of all-time when adjusted for inflation, but as Walt's ambitions grew only larger, and with them, costs, and SNOW WHITE would be only one of two financially successful animated features during the Disney Golden Age.

PINOCCHIO
Released 23 February 1940
Directed by Hamilton Luske (supervising director), Norman Ferguson (sequence director), T. Hee (sequence director), Wilfred Jackson (sequence director), Jack Kinney (sequence director), Bill Roberts (sequence director) & Ben Sharpsteen (supervising director)
Featuring the Voices of: Dickie Jones, Cliff Edwards, Christian Rub, Walter Catlett, Charles Judels, Evelyn Venable, Frankie Darro
88 minutes
Based on "Le avventure di Pinocchio" (1883; English: "The Adventures of Pinocchio") by Carlo Collodi
PINOCCHIO is considered the most perfect of Walt Disney Animation's feature films by many critics and scholars, and the apex of animated feature filmmaking, and on a technical level, at least until the advent of digital animation systems like the Computer Animation Production System that the studio adopted in 1989, it is definitely true.  It is a paragon of technical achievement, and one of the greatest visions of a fairy tale on film.  There have been many live-action screen adaptations of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, and they're all creepy as hell, and not in a good way; but the material is so ideally suited to animation.  Pinocchio can be a wooden puppet while looking as much like other human characters except that he features hinges at his elbows and knees, angular limbs and sounds like wood when its convenient to do so, but in animation, there's no responsibility to extraneous details that are either indulged to creepy effect in live action, or made whimsical to creepy effect in live action.  But PINOCCHIO, alongside FANTASIA, is the most lavishly produced hand-drawn production to come out of the studio, keeping a somewhat grounded but appropriately childlike quality that transcends a cartoon into a living, breathing, and entirely hand-crafted storybook.
Loosely adapting Collodi's episodic and, frankly, nasty tale, the movie follows the adventures of the naive wooden puppet Pinocchio (voiced by child actor Dickie Jones), who is granted life by the Blue Fairy (voiced by Evelyn Venable, also known as the original model for the Columbia Pictures logo) in response to a wish made by his maker, the wood artisan Geppetto (voiced by Christian Rub).  The Blue Fairy promises to make Pinocchio a real boy if he proves himself worthy by being "brave, truthful, and unselfish", and with the guidance of his "conscience", a cricket by the name of Jiminy Cricket (his name a humorous play on the less objectionable exclamatory replacement for "Jesus Christ"; voiced by singer/radio personality/vaudeville performer Cliff Edwards, aka "Ukulele Ike"), Pinocchio sets out to do just that.  But the lad is easily led astray by the likes of the sly fox "Honest John" (voiced by Walter Catlett) and his mute partner-in-crime, Gideon the Cat, or Lampwick (voiced by Frankie Darro), a rotten little boy, and slowly but surely, and after a series of traumatizing close calls, Pinocchio comes to realize what the Blue Fairy meant.
PINOCCHIO is actually a lot like a buddy film, and the story is as much about Jiminy's journey as it is Pinocchio.  When we first meet Jiminy, he's a little bit of a good-natured ne'er-do-well, dressed in rags and kind of a rascal.  He gets the job of being Pinocchio's conscience in the first place by eavesdropping and losing his patience at Pinocchio's naive questions, and then going gaga over the Blue Fairy.  Like Pinocchio though, he's doing his best to do like the Blue Fairy said, and he often throws in the towel in exasperation before eventually coming back around.  Jiminy was the breakout character of the film went to be a recurring icon of the Disney brand, appearing in another feature film, FUN AND FANCY FREE, as well as a series of TV specials and educational films and segments.

Many viewers tend to forget just how dark and frightening this film gets, and although I grew up watching it as a small child, ironically it wasn't until I was older that I realized how scary and intense the movie is.  Although the story doesn't feel episodic, it does follow a pattern through a series of varied scenarios in which Pinocchio resolves to make good, winds up doing the wrong thing anyway, and as worse gets to worst, he oh-so-narrowly escapes and resolves to make good again.  He's locked up in a birdcage by the puppeteer Stromboli, who taunts him that once he's served his purpose of performing for gold coins from audiences across Europe, he'll use him for firewood, a threat he makes as he hurls an axe into a worn-out old puppet.  The climactic sequence in which Pinocchio and Geppetto escape the belly of the whale Monstro is seething with tension as the giant whale propels itself at them on their tiny raft and almost crushes them.  The standout moment of horror in PINOCCHIO however, is undoubtedly at Pleasure Island, where naughty boys are encouraged to indulge in their worst vices, but when night is fallen and the fun is over, they discover too late that their fun was not free.  Drinking ale and smoking cigars with Lampwick (try getting that in a mainstream movie today) while shooting billiards, Pinocchio sees his new friend, a cocksure brat, devolve into screaming hysterics as he turns into a donkey, pawing at Pinocchio as his hands clench into fists that become hooves, and Lampwick's shadow on the wall slowly and painfully is forced onto all fours.  The screams of "Mama!" turn into frantic braying, and as Jiminy witnesses, Lampwick, along with the other boys, will be shipped off to short and hellish lives as beasts of burden in the salt mines.  So yeah, I guess you could call it a kids movie.  You goons.
Aesthetically, PINOCCHIO is unmatched by any other WDA film until BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, but PINOCCHIO is entirely hand-crafted; hand-drawn on paper, hand-traced in ink onto celluloid sheets, hand-painted and positioned over hand-painted backgrounds and shot frame-by-frame on the camera.  This film contains what is almost certainly the most elaborate shot ever created in the pre-digital era of animation, as morning starts in the little Tuscan village, beginning at the bell tower as birds fly past, following over the red rooftops and roads as parents send their children off to school, eventually cutting to Pinocchio and Geppetto outside Geppetto's Workshop.  It's the crowning achievement of the multiplane camera technology, used by WDA to create a three-dimensional effect with two-dimensional, hand-drawn animation.  Invented by William Garity in 1937, the multiplane camera had shelves on which the animation artwork and scenery would be placed, creating a complete, layered image, and the camera could then be moved through the shelf space to appear as if it were moving past the layers.  It was a complex, laborious and expensive process, but the effect can lend a stunning sense of real world space to the fantastical storybook world of the animation, and PINOCCHIO represents the pinnacle of that technology.

The Academy Award-winning signature song of the film, "When You Wish Upon a Star", has gone on to become the theme for the Walt Disney Company itself, appearing over the studio logo at the start of most of their releases, but the entire soundtrack undoubtedly ranks with the studio's best, including the sweet, charming tune "Little Wooden Head", and the carefree ditty "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee".  Just this year, one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer, AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, brought back Pinocchio's showcase number, "I've Got No Strings" as the villainous Ultron's theme.  In PINOCCHIO, the music, written by Leigh Harline (song & score composition), Ned Washington (song lyrics) and Paul J. Smith (score composition), combines with the visual aesthetic and free-flowing story structure to create one of the most richly atmospheric and transporting experiences in animated films.
When PINOCCHIO was released in 1940, it was a box office flop, costing nearly $1 million more than SNOW WHITE to produce while grossing less than 30% that film by the most optimistic estimates.  With the beginning of World War II in September 1939, the European market that had responded so enthusiastically to SNOW WHITE was now cut off, and Walt Disney Productions had to write it off at a $1 million loss.  However, like FANTASIA, BAMBI and a slew of other animated Disney box office failures, re-issues that followed throughout the decades, and home format releases (the first of them in 1985) vindicated PINOCCHIO, making it one of the studio's biggest hits in the long term.  In 1977, even Steven Spielberg made prominent references to it the science fiction classic, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, including a brief snippet of the melody from "When You Wish Upon a Star" at the film's climactic moment (Spielberg was unable to obtain the rights to play the song over the closing credits.  As 2015 marks its 75th anniversary, it remains as potent as ever, and one of the enduring landmarks of not only The Walt Disney Company or the medium of animation, but also of movies in general and American iconography.

FANTASIA
Released 13 November 1940
Directed by Norm Ferguson (segment director), James Algar (segment director), Samuel Armstrong (segment director), Ford Beebe Jr. (segment director), Jim Handley (segment director), T. Hee (segment director), Wilfred Jackson (segment director), Hamilton Luske (segment director), Bill Roberts (segment director), Paul Satterfield (segment director), Ben Sharpsteen (segment director) & David Hand (segment director)
Featuring the Voices of: Walt Disney, Julietta Novis
Featuring Appearances by: Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor
125 minutes
Anthology film based on "Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach, "The Nutcracker Suite" by Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Dukas, "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky, "Symphony No. 6 in F major" by Ludwig van Beethoven, "Dance of the Hours" by Amilcare Ponchielli, "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky, and "Ave Maria" by Franz Schubert
FANTASIA was the most ambitious film that Walt Disney ever produced, a lavish, experimental production that Walt believed would change the landscape of animation, filmmaking and music, and in a sense did, but not in the way he hoped or needed.  It was a movie well ahead of its time, introducing new technologies and new ways of understanding music and film and the relationship between the creative mediums.  It was the brainchild of Disney and Leopold Stowkowski, the long-time conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as identifiable with classical music at the time as Walt was with animation, noted for his fierce style of conducting and his characteristically wild white hair.  Disney's popular "Silly Symphonies" series of animated shorts had blended animation and classical music, but FANTASIA was meant to take the idea further, carrying animation into prestige within the artistic community, beyond the its status as a mere "pop art".  Stowkowski hoped FANTASIA would help propel classic music back into the public consciousness.

The film is presented in a concert format, with each musical animated segment introduced in artistically lit live-action scenes by a master of ceremonies, Deems Taylor, a noted music critic who assisted Disney and Stowkowski in selecting which compositions were to be featured.  There are seven animated sequences inspired by classical music, as well as a "Meet the Soundtrack" scene that introduces different sections and timbres of the orchestra.  Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" features abstract animation that responds to the music specifically with lines, waves, shapes and colors.  Selections of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite" accompany a montage of the changing seasons, with slightly racist Asian characters in the form of mushrooms during the "Chinese Dance", including an impish little mushroom modeled after Dopey from SNOW WHITE, dandelions reminiscent of Cossacks dance the "Russian Dance" and fairies paint the leaves with frost at the advent of winter.  The film's most famous segment, Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", stars Mickey Mouse (voiced by Walt Disney) as the apprentice of a sorcerer who gets in over his head when he recklessly uses advanced magic to do a simple chore while his master is away.  The lengthiest and most impressive segment is Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", an avant-garde and then-somewhat controversial piece that presents the scientifically-informed (by the standards of the day) origins of the planet Earth, from its initial forming from raw materials and early millennia as a globe of blistering volcanic activity, to the evolution of life from the primordial soup and into the dinosaurs, ending with the extinction of the "thunder lizards" (the continuation of the segment in which mammals would evolve into modern man was planned but scrapped as too "controversial").  Beethoven's "The Pastoral Symphony" (lambasted by classical music aficionados of the time, because Beethoven is like The Beatles of classical music, and the music buffs hate to see him reinterpreted) is a slightly more cartoonish segment, depicting the courtship of young centaurs and centaurettes and the festivities of various Greco-Roman deities.  Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" is presented as a comic ballet featuring animal performers representing four periods of the day, with ostriches in the morning, hippos in the afternoon, elephants in the evening, and alligators in the night.  The final segment is in two parts, with Modest Mussorgsky's sinister "Night on Bald Mountain" as the hulking devil Chernabog oversees a Black Mass, a satanic orgy as various demons and flames of hellfire dance, followed by Schubert's "Ave Maria" in the triumph of good, repelling Chernabog and his minions back to into the darkness as the dawn breaks and a chorus of saints carries torches through a forest as the trees take on the form of a natural cathedral.

FANTASIA never existed as Walt had envisioned it would, as a living, evolving piece of cinema that would maintain some old standards while introducing new segments and musical selections over decades of re-issues (this notion of a living, continuing creative project would later be fulfilled by Walt with Disneyland, while his nephew Roy would attempt something in the manner of Walt's vision for FANTASIA with FANTASIA 2000), so in a sense, it's incomplete.  It laid the groundwork for future popular entertainment like music videos and pushed the envelope in ways that hadn't been done before, and in some cases, since.  It was the first commercially released film to use stereophonic sound, now taken for granted in cinemas today, developed with the name "Fantasound", intended to simulate the immersive sound quality of an actual concert (Disney requested that theaters install the expensive sound system when exhibiting the film, which made it prohibitively expensive in most cases).  The audio recording and exhibiting technology used in making and distributing the film was as ahead of its time as the experimental content, but would eventually hit the mainstream in later years.
"The Pastoral Symphony" is probably the weakest link in the set, and now appears in an edited form, with a couple of distasteful racist stereotypes, including a little black centaurette who polishes a white centaurette's hooves.  It's a cartoonish and sillier segment, but the film as a whole is a wonder.
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is the film's most famous segment, and probably Mickey Mouse's most famous appearance, and without negating that, "The Rite of Spring" and "Night on Bald Mountain" are the greatest achievements of FANTASIA.  As recently as 1913, Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", a ballet based on pagan myths, had caused an uproar when performed in Paris and was a controversial choice advised by Taylor for the film.  It's ambition is enormous, beginning at the origins of the world, synchronizing the bursting bubbles of molten rock with the rhythm of the orchestra, and attempting to create a vision accurate to the scientific reality.  More than half a century before Industrial Light & Magic created photo-realistic dinosaurs onscreen in JURASSIC PARK, FANTASIA aimed to create the most realistic depiction of everyone's favorite prehistoric beasts possible, with a sobriety and savagery that transcended the reputation of the studio.  Rendered according to the understanding of dinosaur anatomy at the time, the sequence climaxes in a confrontation between a stegosaurus and a carnivore.  These are friendly, anthropomorphized, talking dinosaurs.  The carnivore clamps down on the stegosaurus' neck until it dies and proceeds to eat it.
SNOW WHITE and PINOCCHIO have their own pretty terrifying moments, but in "Night on Bald Mountain", Disney cranks the horror up to 11 with Chernabog, the towering achievement of legendary animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, a hulking devil (a variation on the Slavic pagan deity "Crnobog", meaning "black god") perched atop Bald Mountain as he oversees the satanic rituals taking place in the palm of his hand.  Sexy dancing ladies writhe as he turns them into swine, and screeching harpies swoop about (curiously, while the Production Code Office prohibited the animators from drawing nipples on the centaurettes in "The Pastoral Symphony", they got away with having them on the harpies), while flames flick through the unholy orgy and warping wraiths emerge from the nearby cemetery.  And when the morning dawns, the agony is on the great demon's face, before he bows to its will and wraps himself in his wings, forming the peak of the mountain.
Walt would never again reach the creative heights of FANTASIA in animation again, as it became an even greater financial loss than PINOCCHIO (until, again, future re-issues came to make its money back many times over), resulting in a financial strain that forced him to make cuts to BAMBI, and WWII put the studio's production of feature animation on a hiatus that the studio wouldn't truly recover from until the Disney Renaissance in 1989.

DUMBO
Released 31 October 1941
Directed by Ben Sharpsteen (supervising director), Sam Armstrong (sequence director), Norman Ferguson (sequence director), Wilfred Jackson (sequence director), Jack Kinney (sequence director) & Bill Roberts (sequence director)
64 minutes
Featuring the Voices of: Edward Brophy, Verna Felton, Cliff Edwards, Herman Bing, Sterling Holloway, Margaret Wright, Noreen Gammill, Dorothy Scott, Sarah Selby
Based on "Dumbo" (1939?), a "Roll-A-Book" by Helen Aberson & Harold Pearl
DUMBO came as an emergency measure in the midst of the most tumultuous point in the early years of WDA feature animation.  After losing money on the lavishly-produced PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA, while the upcoming and continuously delayed BAMBI suck up financial resources the studio didn't have, Walt saw his would-be animation utopia torn asunder by a Screen Cartoonists Guild strike that grew more and more bitter over a protracted 5 weeks, decimating studio morale and losing some of Walt's lead animators.  DUMBO was designed as a studio-saving measure, an inexpensive, commercially-assured feature, standing in sharp contrast to the extravagant and experimental filmmaking of FANTASIA.
Taken from what is probably WDA's most unique story source, a toy prototype called a "Roll-A-Book" (essentially a moving panorama story for children), DUMBO's eponymous character is born to Mrs. Jumbo (voiced by Verna Felton), a circus elephant who names him Jumbo, Jr., but upon seeing the little calf's over-sized ears, the catty social circle of other elephants dub him "Dumbo" and the moniker sticks.  After Mrs. Jumbo is locked up as a "mad elephant" for losing her temper at an obnoxious boy who torments her calf, Dumbo is left on his own.  Dumbo is ousted from the community of elephants and forced to be part of the clown act, but Timothy (voiced by Edward Brophy), a mouse with a thick (occasionally annoying) New York accent, takes him under his sympathetic wing.  After they both wake up in a tree after a night of accidental intoxication, Timothy becomes convinced that Dumbo's massive ears can be used to fly, but the real challenge is proving it in the circus tent.

DUMBO strikes an interesting balance between the evolving impressionistic style of FANTASIA and the studio's more ambitious shorts, and a simplistic, straightforward cartoon.  Its low cost is starkly apparent in comparison to the other four features of this period, full of simple colors and designs and relatively liberal use of the "squash and stretch" principle.  In place of the richly layered worlds of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS and PINOCCHIO, DUMBO embraces simplicity and surrealism with the same heart as those earlier features.  The color palette alternates between the bright, saturated tones of daytime scenes and the circus, and the dark greys and blues of the "Song of the Roustabouts", and the watercolor backgrounds were the last used in an animated feature film by WDA until LILO & STITCH 61 years later.  Rather than pushing to advance the art form in a technical sense, DUMBO is a veritable animator's playground with loose movements, rounded shapes and a lot of heart and character to go with it all.  Great character animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, who ultimately left the studio in 1943 due to feeling unwelcome for participating in the strike, best known for heavy and sometimes threatening characters like Stromboli from PINOCCHIO, Chernabog from FANTASIA and Grumpy from SNOW WHITE, animates the silent title character with a sincerity and honestly childlike demeanor, especially notable in the bath scene as Dumbo plays in the water.  "Baby Mine" is the real heart string-pulling scene, but the bizarre and slightly frightening surrealistic "Pink Elephants on Parade" is arguably the most memorable sequence of the film.  Based on the early 20th-century euphemism to be so drunk that one is "seeing pink elephants", the scene follows Dumbo and Timothy becoming unwittingly intoxicated from a bucket of water mixed with champagne,the "Pink Elephants" sequence is one of WDA's most famous examples of surrealist animation as brightly colored elephantine characters morphing between varied shapes and forms, accompanied by the upbeat but eerie musical number by Oliver Wallace and Ned Washington, performed by The Sportsmen.

With a particularly spare source material and a contemporary setting, DUMBO is a small movie, and without negating its entertainment and emotional value, it's fair to identify as closer to a feature-length "cartoon" than the rest of the Golden Age, or most of the studio's animated features, not including the "package films" that would dominate their output after BAMBI and through the rest of the decade.  According to the American Film Institute, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Institute, a feature length film must be no less than 40 minutes long, while the Screen Actors Guild cites a minimum of 80 minutes, but at 64 minutes, Disney's distributor, RKO, was reluctant to release DUMBO as a main feature.  At the time, one admission at the cinema counted for more than the specific movie that patrons were going to see; people could see a newsreel, a couple of short films (often animated short films made by Disney), a B-movie, a shorter, less expensive film without major stars (the term has since come to refer to a cheaply-made amateurish movie), and the A-movie, aka the feature attraction.  Disney's animated features were always A-movies, but considering its slight running time, RKO wanted to release it as a B-movie, which Disney refused to allow, and he got his way.  DUMBO and SNOW WHITE were the only WDA features during the Golden Age to turn a profit during their initial release, and TIME magazine was planning to announce Dumbo as "Mammal of the Year" on the 29 December 1941 cover, but cancelled it when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December.  As the United States officially entered WWII, the U.S. Army and the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics contracted most of the studio's facilities and resources into making propaganda and training films, and the studio's only significant revenue during this time came from a 1944 re-issue of SNOW WHITE.  The studio still had one more Golden Age feature in the pipeline, but DUMBO, a minor production but a major and enduring hit, had come into being at the end of an era.

BAMBI
Released 21 August 1942
Directed by David D. Hand (supervising director), James Algar (sequence director), Sam Armstrong (sequence director), Graham Heid (sequence director), Bill Roberts (sequence director), Paul Satterfield (sequence director) & Norman Wright (sequence director)
Featuring the Voices of: Hardie Albright, John Sutherland, Donnie Dunagan, Peter Behn, Tim Davis, Sam Edwards, Stan Alexander, Sterling Holloway, Will Wright, Cammie King, Ann Gillis, Fred Shields, Paula Winslowe, Bobby Stewart
70 minutes
Based on Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923; English: Bambi, a Life in the Woods) by Felix Salten
At the time that Walt Disney became interested in producing an animated adaptation of the Austrian novella Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Felix Salten, it was a popular contemporary book and subjected to the infamous Nazi book burnings in its native country of Austria, considered an anti-fascist "political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe".  Such an allegory is less apparent to the modern reader than the environmental, anti-hunting themes, but Salten's novella is a darkly disturbing and adult story about a deer coming of age in the forest, and it remains very affecting nine decades after it was written.

Disney's version is somewhat lighter, and significantly less gory (disturbing at times maybe, but not gory at all, actually), but is nonetheless one of the deeper and darker WDA features, especially in their early years.  There isn't a strong plot line that carries through the film; as the title of the source material suggests, it is a "life in the woods", beginning at the birth of Bambi, a young fawn and the "young prince of the forest".  With the guidance of his mother (voiced by Paula Winslowe), and his friends Thumper (voiced at various ages by Peter Behn, Tim Davis and Sam Edwards), a rabbit, and Flower (voiced at various ages by Stan Alexander, Tim Davis and Sterling Holloway), a skunk, Bambi (voiced at various ages by Bobby Stewart, Donnie Dunagan, Hardie Albright and John Sutherland) grows up in the deciduous forest, enduring the long winter and learning to be cautious of the forest's great enemy, "Man".  In the film's most famous scene, Bambi's mother is shot and killed by a hunter, at which time Bambi's father, the Great Prince, teaches him how to survive on his own as Bambi matures into a young stag.  The following spring, Bambi, Thumper and Flower find their mates, Bambi with Faline (voiced at various ages by Cammie King and Ann Gillis), a doe he played with as fawns.  Then Man returns to the forest in a hunting party, and Bambi fends off Man's hounds to protect Faline before Man's fire spreads quickly, turning the forest into a fiery inferno.  Not all the animals survive, but among those who make it to the safety of the riverbank are Bambi, Faline and the Great Prince.  When spring comes again, the forest has renewed itself once again as Flower and Thumper, both of them fathers now, and the other animals of the forest gather to witness Faline's newborn twins, while Bambi, ascended as the Great Prince of the Forest, looks on.
BAMBI is a beautiful, moving film, but is not one of WDA's more re-watchable features, moving at a relatively slow pace through the meandering story.  Regardless, it's undeniably one of the most majestic and remarkable animated features made, especially in the latter half when the cute animal hijinks give way to a powerful story of survival and the circle of life with some of Disney's most awe-inspiring scenes.  The wildfire sequence is one of Disney's most dramatic, with Bambi and the Great Prince evading blazing logs and raining embers before leaping from a pouring waterfall in a visually spectacular moment topped off by a stunning long shot of the raging fire that has engulfed the tallest trees.

The first half, while lavishly produced and certainly with its moments, is less interesting than the second, largely revolving around young Bambi, Thumper and Flower as they experience the changing of the seasons and relying heavily on cute gags and vignettes of nature.  The vignettes are fascinating, stopping to see the natural world, hand-crafted on animation cels of course, in its small moments like a field mouse rubbing its face with a dew drop or the famous "Little April Showers" sequence showing the animals covering themselves from a rainstorm.  Scenes of young Bambi, Thumper and Flower are cutesy and modestly amusing, but what makes them stand out is how the behavior is so true to actual children, such as Bambi's first encounter with Faline, which is a little awkward, but in a manner very true to the spirit of actual childhood play.
BAMBI is the last film on which Disney's house composer Frank Churchill, whose iconic work included "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" for the animated short, "The Three Little Pigs", and the song scores for SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS and DUMBO.  For BAMBI, he composed the gorgeous theme, "Love is a Song", one of the most underrated songs in Disney's vast and beloved library, which plays over the opening credits and acts as a recurring theme until it's reprised by the Disney choir as Bambi and the Great Prince look on at the birth of Bambi's offspring and the end title card comes up.  Tragically, he committed suicide at the age of 40 only a few months before the film's release when he put a shotgun in his mouth and died at his piano.

Frank Churchill

BAMBI's influence has reverberated throughout many films that have followed, especially animation, such as Don Bluth's Steven Spielberg and George Lucas-produced 1988 hit, THE LAND BEFORE TIME, even paying homage to the Disney classic as specifically as recreating the gag in which the baby birds fight over berries with baby pterodactyls.  Bluth's film opens with dinosaurs gathering to see the hatching of a baby apatosaurus named Littlefoot, and in a pivotal scene, Littlefoot's mother is killed by a "sharp-tooth" (Tyrannosaurus), a scene that is significantly more graphic than the mother's death in BAMBI.  However, the story does not carry Littlefoot and his friends into the realm of adulthood.  More than 50 years after BAMBI, Disney made a similarly-themed film that became one of the most successful movies of all time, 1994's THE LION KING.  Also opening with a gathering in the animal kingdom to witness the arrival of a new prince, and featuring the devastating death of a parent, THE LION KING is a story about the circle of life, and the only other WDA feature without any onscreen human characters.  But unlike in THE LION KING, mankind does play a role in the action in BAMBI, a vicious and terrifying role that placed "Man", who never appears onscreen, at #20 on the American Film Institute's list of the 50 greatest film villains.  The movie undeniably fuels an anti-hunting sentiment, although it's certainly not as explicit as it was in Salten's book.  The film was denounced by hunting groups from the moment of its release in 1942, and while the message is clear, it's doubtful that Disney was trying to so much to start a social movement as he was trying to tell a good story.  I find hunting distasteful, but for reasons against eating meat, which I enjoy in moderation.  I disdain the thought of killing animals for sport, and in a world where meat is so readily available, there is no other reason for hunting in terms of personal reasons.  In terms of the general welfare, there are issues involving species population control, but that's not why hunters hunt; it's one of the ways they justify hunting.  In the context of BAMBI though, who's defending the Man who kills a mother doe and carelessly leaves a campfire to set the forest ablaze?  C'mon guys.
The production is undeniably splendid with the gorgeous scenery of legendary Disney artist Ty

All images via Disney

Wong, and the practiced, detailed animation that had so clearly evolved since the animals of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, BAMBI is the conclusion of the Disney Golden Age, also known as "The Big Five".  It followed PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA as yet another highly expensive and ambitiously experimental production that failed to recoup its costs as the world fell into WWII, cutting off the European market as the Walt Disney Studios were contracted by the U.S. Army and Navy Bureau of Aeronautics to focus their efforts of mostly unprofitable military training and propaganda films.  Worst of all, the animators' strike in 1941, protesting Disney's flawed merit-based wage system, descended in a bitter conflict that lost him some of his most talented artists and destroyed morale at the studio.  Although the studio eventually returned to producing feature animation, some projects on the studio's slate since the immediate aftermath of SNOW WHITE, but Walt's heart was rarely in it the same way again.  BAMBI was the last animated feature in which Walt played such an active role.

This series will continue in The Disney Package Films (1943-1949)

17 Movies to Look Forward to Through the End of 2015

Another summer movie season has come and gone, and this one was a marked improvement over the past couple.  Unfortunately, the unexpected smash hit of the summer was JURASSIC WORLD, now the third highest-grossing movie of all-time, but we also got a pair of brilliant masterpieces that couldn't be more different; MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, an adrenaline-soaked thrill ride, and INSIDE OUT, an extremely inventive, powerfully emotional comedy-fantasy.
Turning our eyes toward the remainder of the year, there's still numerous movies to look forward to, ranging from high-profile awards season fare to a few highly-anticipated blockbusters that are likely to make this one of the most memorable holiday movie seasons on record.  While certain surprises are sure to present themselves along the way, these are the movies that have the most to offer from where we're standing right now:

Opens Nationwide 18 September 2015
BLACK MASS  (CRIME DRAMA) 
Directed by Scott Cooper
Starring: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Jesse Plemons, Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll, Sienna Miller, David Harbour, Rory Cochrane
Rated R for brutal violence, language throughout, some sexual references and brief drug use.
Johnny Depp attempts to get back into legitimate acting as the infamous gangster Whitey Bulger who became an FBI informant in 1975 and managed to rise in the Boston Irish mob for years without Federal interference in exchange for informing on his rivals until the New England media brought attention to the corruption in law enforcement tied to Bulger.  BLACK MASS has a stacked cast with Benedict Cumberbatch as Whitey's Massachusetts State Senator brother, and Joel Edgerton as his FBI contact, as well as Dakota Johnson (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY), Kevin Bacon, and Jesse Plemons (Breaking Bad).  Scott Cooper, director of CRAZY HEART and OUT OF THE FURNACE, is the most questionable major aspect here, but the previews suggest a hard-edged period crime drama led by a Depp performance to hopefully bring him back from the live-action cartoons he's been driving into the ground lately.

Opens Nationwide 25 September 2015
EVEREST  (ADVENTURE-THRILLER) 
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
Starring: Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhall, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Robin Wright, Emily Watson, Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Thomas Wright, Naoko Mori
Rated PG-13 for intense peril and disturbing images.
This survival adventure-thriller from the director of 2 GUNS and CONTRABAND is based on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster in which mountain climbers attempting to reach the summit of the highest mountain on Earth were caught in a severe blizzard and resulted in several deaths.  Filled out with a promising cast led by Jason Clarke (DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) and Jake Gyllenhall, Universal recently moved its nationwide release to September 25 from September 18, in order to give it a week exclusively in IMAX and other large format theaters in order to build a word-of-mouth campaign, which suggests a degree of faith in the movie from the studio.  Maybe it will be the GRAVITY of mountain climbing movies, or maybe it will just be a real taut fall thriller.

Opens Nationwide 2 October 2015 
THE MARTIAN  (SCI-FI/ADVENTURE)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Donald Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Naomi Scott, Aksel Hennie
Rated PG-13 for some strong language, injury images, and brief nudity.
THE MARTIAN is not a really solid bet, but it has the potential to pay off well.  Adapted from Andy Weir's 2011 novel of the same name, it's essentially "Robinson Crusoe on Mars", which was actually a movie in 1964.  Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars and presumed dead, so he has to figure out how to survive in an uninhabitable environment, and after he manages to send a signal to Earth of his survival, the scientists on Earth scramble to come up with a rescue mission.  The big thing that THE MARTIAN has going for it is a script by Drew Goddard, who's done some exciting stuff with CLOVERFIELD and CABIN IN THE WOODS.  The big wild card is Ridley Scott, who is wildly hit and miss, more miss than hit lately, with the dreadfully disappointing EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS last year.  With Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain in the mix, it may smack a bit much of INTERSTELLAR, but they're both solid actors and the projected tone is a lot less self-serious.

Opens Nationwide 9 October 2015 
STEVE JOBS  (BIOPIC/DRAMA)
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Katherine Waterston, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sarah Snook, Adam Shapiro, Mackenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo
Rated R for language.
This was originally meant to be a reuniting of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, the team behind one of my all-time favorite movies, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but negotiations with Fincher fell through, which was disappointing.  On the other hand, Academy Award-winning director Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) is no slouch, and it still has a Sorkin script that, based on the trailer, is a lot more aggressive and scathing than his take on Mark Zuckerberg.  With a plot device intriguing enough to make the mouth water, STEVE JOBS is set behind the scenes of three iconic product launches and stars Michael Fassbender as the titular iconic innovator while exploring the tumultuous relationships and partnerships in his life.  Also included in the cast are Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman co-developer of the original Macintosh and NeXT.  Expect this movie to be a big player in the awards season and a subject of heated debate.

Opens Nationwide 9 October 2015 
THE WALK  (BIOPIC/DRAMA) 
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz, Steve Valentine, Charlotte Le Bon, Sergio Di Zio, Mark Camacho, Benedict Samuel
Rated PG for thematic elements involving perilous situations, and for some nudity, language, brief drug references and smoking.
A dramatic adaptation of the events previously depicted in the excellent documentary MAN ON WIRE, this latest film from Robert Zemeckis recounts the true story of Philippe Petit, who walked across a high-wire tied between the World Trade Center Twin Towers in 1974 without authorization.  The marketing has emphasized the vertigo-inducing visuals of the presumably climactic walk, but the story also involves a heist aspect in planning the illegal stunt.  I don't have strong feelings about Zemeckis's last film, FLIGHT, although it has developed some generally negative ones in people since it came out in 2012, but I still have goodwill towards him as a director.  Hopefully the visual spectacle of the story crossed with the inherent drama of the subject will play to Zemeckis' strengths, but in any case, I'm interested to see what he comes up with.

Opens Nationwide 16 October 2015 
BRIDGE OF SPIES  (DRAMA/THRILLER) 
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, Austin Stowell, Domenick Lombardozzi, Sebastian Koch, Michael Gaston, Peter McRobbie, Stephen Kunken, Joshua Harto, Edward James Hyland
Rated PG-13 for some violence and brief strong language.
Steven Spielberg's latest film is a truth-based Cold War thriller that reunites him with actor Tom Hanks in their first film together since THE TERMINAL in 2004.  Hanks stars as James B. Donovan, a Brooklyn lawyer hired by the CIA to negotiate the release of Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), an American pilot shot down over the Soviet Union while performing a reconnaissance mission, during the 1960 U-2 incident that deteriorated the already tense relations between the two world powers.  From a screenplay by the Coen brothers (although judging by GAMBIT and UNBROKEN, that may not mean much in the hands of another director), this is premium material for a Spielberg drama, with the tagline "In the shadow of war, one man showed the world what we stand for".  In any case, Spielberg is one of the greatest directors working today, not to mention one of the greatest directors ever, and his output as a director is always worth looking forward to.

Opens Nationwide 16 October 2015 
CRIMSON PEAK  (HORROR/SUPERNATURAL-THRILLER) 
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Emily Coutts, Leslie Hope, Burn Gorman, Doug Jones, Sofia Wells, Laura Waddell
Rated R for bloody violence, some sexual content and brief strong language.
The most fun scary movies are haunted house movies, but good ones are so few and far in between, so as this Gothic horror/romance about an old English mansion teeming with ghostly entities is coming from the extremely talented filmmaker behind PAN'S LABYRINTH, PACIFIC RIM and the Hellboy films, I'm very excited.  Guillermo del Toro's CRIMSON PEAK is an original story set in 19th-century England (a properly spooky time and place) where a young woman (played by ALICE IN WONDERLAND's Mia Wasikowska) falls in love with a nobleman (played by MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS' Tom Hiddleston), but discovers that he is not all that he seems after they marry and his ancestral home, an crumbling old mansion, hides many dark secrets of a supernatural variety.
With an R rating and an apparently lavish, atmospheric style, this looks like the E-ticket of the Halloween season.  Stephen King has already called it "gorgeous and just f***ing terrifying".

Opens Nationwide 6 November 2015 
THE PEANUTS MOVIE  (ANIMATION/FAMILY-COMEDY) 
Directed by Steve Martino
Featuring the Voices of: Noah Schnapp, Hadley Belle Miller, Alexander Garfin, Mariel Sheets, Noah Johnston, Venus Schultheis, AJ Teece, Francesca Capaldi, Mar Mar, Rebecca Bloom
Rated G
Clearly the world has gone and turned over on itself, because this movie from Blue Sky Studios (the studio behind the Ice Age and Rio series, and EPIC) shows a lot more promise than the movie coming out from Pixar later the same month (THE GOOD DINOSAUR).  Computer-animated, but in a unique style that resembles the iconic Bill Melendez TV specials, it's a simple story about Charlie Brown trying to win the affections of the new girl in class, the Little Red-Haired Girl, that is.  Meanwhile, of course, his dog Snoopy is going up against the Red Baron.  With a voice cast made up primarily of children newcomers, it probably won't be as weighty and insightful as INSIDE OUT, but it looks like it has a finger on the pulse of the childlike charm and wit Charles M. Schulz's iconic characters.

Opens Nationwide 6 November 2015 
SPECTRE  (ACTION/ADVENTURE) 
Directed by Sam Mendes
Starring: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Lea Seydoux, Monica Bellucci, Andrew Scott, Dave Bautista, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Wishaw, Rory Kinnear, Jesper Christensen
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, some disturbing images, sensuality and language.
SKYFALL director Sam Mendes is returning for the 24th James Bond movie and continues to further explore 007's origins and reintegrate the classic Bond with 21st-century Bond.  While it's risky, it sure looks exciting.  Daniel Craig returns as Bond, going up against the villainous classic Bond organization SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) and a mysterious man within the global crime syndicate named Franz Oberhauser (although widespread fan speculation says that he's secretly Blofeld, the leader of the organization in previous Bond films), played by Christoph Waltz.  With Lea Seydoux (BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR) and Monica Bellucci as Bond girls, and Ralph Fiennes and Naomie Harris reprising their roles from SKYFALL, SPECTRE is the big blockbuster to kick off the holiday season.

Opens Nationwide 20 November 2015 
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 2  (ACTION/SCI-FI)
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Sam Claflin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Donald Sutherland, Willow Shields, Jena Malone, Stanley Tucci, Jeffrey Wright
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and for some thematic material.
To date, THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1 has been the weakest of the series, primarily because it was only half a story, one book split in two in order to prolong the franchise, but after a year of waiting, we'll finally get the second half of the story to what is probably the best of the YA literature-based film franchises.  Now we get the full-on war of revolution these films have been building to, as Katniss Everdeen (played by the ever-excellent Jennifer Lawrence) leads the attack on the Capitol and the sinister tyrant President Snow (Donald Sutherland), facing perils designed by the remaining "gamemakers", as well as the complicated moral dilemmas in a war that will determine the future of Panem.

Opens Nationwide 25 November 2015
CREED  (SPORTS DRAMA) 
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Tony Bellew, Graham McTavish, Phylicia Rashad, Wood Harris, Andre Ward
Not Yet Rated
This fascinating new direction for the Rocky series puts the focus on Adonis Creed (played by Michael B. Jordan), the son of Rocky Balboa's revered old boxing rival Apollo Creed, who is now trying to start a boxing career of his own and arrives in Philadelphia to be mentored by none other than Rocky himself (played by Sylvester Stallone).  Directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, the writer/director of the criminally under-seen 2013 drama FRUITVALE STATION, which also starred Jordan, one the most talented up-and-coming young stars around today, CREED looks like it will inject a hard, contemporary and relevant edge to the waning Rocky series.  This is one of the most exciting prospects of the holiday movie season.

Opens Nationwide 25 November 2015 
THE NIGHT BEFORE  (COMEDY) 
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring: Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anthony Mackie, Lizzy Caplan, Jillian Bell, Lorraine Toussaint, Kanye West, Aaron Hill, Helene Yorke
Not Yet Rated
I'm doubtful that this will be the new great comedy, but Seth Rogen's and Evan Goldberg's collaborations on NEIGHBORS, THIS IS THE END and SUPERBAD have been some the funniest, craziest comedies in recent years, and I'm always up for an irreverent treatment of Christmas.  Directed by Jonathan Levine (director of 50/50 and WARM BODIES), THE NIGHT BEFORE stars Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie as longtime buddies who get together for a night out every Christmas Eve, but as this might be the last year they can do it, they decide to make it a night to remember full of drugs and debauchery.  It looks funny enough to me.

Opens Nationwide 11 December 2015 
IN THE HEART OF THE SEA  (ADVENTURE/DRAMA) 
Directed by Ron Howard
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Wishaw, Brendan Gleeson, Michelle Fairley, Gary Beadle, Frank Dillane, Charlotte Ripley
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence, and thematic material.
I was bummed out when movie was moved from its original March 13 release date to December, presumably to give it a stronger chance at awards consideration, which suggests a show of faith in the film by the studio, but meant I have to wait longer to see it.  Based on the nonfiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick, this big-budget, fact-based adventure-thriller/drama tells the story of a whaling ship that was sunk by an attacking sperm whale, leaving the surviving crew stranded at sea in a small life boat for months, turning on each other and even resorting to cannibalism.  The real life events later inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.  Chris Hemsworth stars as the ship's first mate, with Benjamin Walker (ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER) as the captain, Cillian Murphy (BATMAN BEGINS) as second mate, and Tom Holland (who will appear in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR and future Marvel Studios films as Peter Parker/Spider-Man) as the cabin boy.  This is the kind of movie that I wish they could make more of but are rarely bankable, a large-scale, historical adventure with adult drama and weight.  It sort of reminds me of 2003's MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD, an exceptional adventure-drama if you haven't seen it.

Opens Nationwide 18 December 2015 
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS  (ACTION-ADVENTURE/FANTASY) 
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring: John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Max von Sydow, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Lupita Nyong'o, Gwendoline Christie, Simon Pegg
Not Yet Rated
I shouldn't have to explain this one.

Opens Nationwide 18 December 2015 
SISTERS  (COMEDY) 
Directed by Jason Moore
Starring: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Ike Barinholtz, Samantha Bee, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Madison Davenport, John Leguizamo, John Cena, Kate McKinnon, Dan Byrd, James Brolin
Rated R for crude sexual content and language throughout, and for drug use.
The preview released some weeks ago was a disappointment, but I still have hope for this female buddy-comedy starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.  Directed by Jason Moore (director of PITCH PERFECT) and written by Saturday Night Live alum Paula Pell, the R-rated comedy stars Fey and Poehler as sisters who decide to through one last raging party with their adult friends in their childhood home before their parents sell it.

Opens in Limited Release 25 December 2015 
THE HATEFUL EIGHT  (WESTERN/COMEDY-THRILLER) 
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Zoe Bell, Dana Gourrier
Not Yet Rated
I'm a little annoyed that Quentin Tarantino's latest film will be opening exclusively in the 70 mm format on Christmas Day (opens everywhere January 6, 2016), because that will make it harder to find, but if it's available within 70 miles or so, I'll make the drive.  Following up DJANGO UNCHAINED with another western, albeit more directly a western this time, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is set in post-Civil War Wyoming where a colorful octet of characters, "The Hangman" (Kurt Russell), "The Bounty Hunter" (Samuel L. Jackson), "The Prisoner" (Jennifer Jason Leigh), "The Sheriff" (Walton Goggins), "The Mexican" (Demian Bichir), "The Little Man" (Tim Roth), "The Cow Puncher" (Michael Madsen), and "The Confederate" (Bruce Dern) are snowed in at a stagecoach stop during a terrible blizzard, but in a plot of deception and betrayal, not all is what it seems.
Tarantino is probably the most consistent and distinctive filmmaker working today, and THE HATEFUL EIGHT looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

Opens Nationwide 25 December 2015 
SNOWDEN  (BIOPIC/DRAMA) 
Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Scott Eastwood, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Nicolas Cage, Keith Stanfield, Rhys Ifans
Not Yet Rated
I wouldn't call any Oliver Stone film a safe bet, especially nowadays when it seems all his great films are so far behind him, but the source material of the events leading up to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's choice to violate the Espionage Act by leaking classified NSA documents that revealed the massive and extremely troubling U.S. surveillance programs in place since the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama Administration is relevant and ripe for cinematic dramatization and could play to Stone's strengths.  With a strong cast led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the title character and Shailene Woodley as his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, it remains to be seen if Stone is up to the task.

Review: FANTASTIC FOUR

FANTASTIC FOUR  (ACTION/SCI-FI)
1 out of 4 stars
Directed by Josh Trank
Starring: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Castellaneta, Tim Heidecker, Owen Judge, Evan Hannemann, Mary Rachel Dudley
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and language.
100 minutes
Verdict: A fantastic form of failure, FANTASTIC FOUR lets down a wonderful cast with a detached vision, a pedestrian screenplay and an utter lack of payoff culminating in the glaring absence of a third act.
YOU MAY ENJOY FANTASTIC FOUR IF YOU LIKED:
CHRONICLE  (2012)
FANTASTIC FOUR  (2005)
FANTASTIC 4: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER  (2007)
X-MEN  (2000)
DIVERGENT  (2014)

"In issue 141 of the Fantastic Four, published in November, 1973, Reed Richards had to use his anti-matter weapon on his own son, who Aannihilus has turn into the Human Atom Bomb. It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four, because they weren't like other superheroes. They were more like a family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal anti-matter. Your family is the void you emerge from, and the place you return to when you die. And that's the paradox - the closer you're drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go."
-THE ICE STORM  (1997)

At the center of the Fantastic Four superhero team, one of Marvel Comics' most noteworthy series hailing back to the Silver Age of Comics, is a family dynamic.  They aggravate one another and yet each feel responsible for one another, and in spite of disagreements, they ultimately come together to work as a team.  In Tim Story's FANTASTIC FOUR, released in 2005, and its 2007 sequel, FANTASTIC 4: RISE OF SILVER SURFER, they were interpreted as flippantly goofy family comedy.  They were sitcoms.  The superhero family has worked before though, back in 2004 with Brad Bird's Disney/Pixar production of THE INCREDIBLES, one of the best superhero movies ever made, and which featured original characters whose team dynamic, even many of their individual traits, were comparable to the Fantastic Four.  With the bar set so low by Story's version, and a decade of advances made in superhero blockbusters, the new reboot, also titled FANTASTIC FOUR, didn't need to be as good as THE INCREDIBLES, but not only does the new film seem to lack a fundamental understanding of it characters, it lacks any motivation and a complete story.  Directed by Josh Trank, whose first film CHRONICLE was an original superhero hit in 2012, FANTASTIC FOUR is one of the most astoundingly misguided major movies in recent memory.  When the box office is dominated by mega-budgeted, generic brand name blockbusters that have been carefully shepherded through production under watchful studio eyes with vested interested in their $100+million investments to assure an audience-friendly, inoffensive product, FANTASTIC FOUR misfires in an incredibly unexpected way.  It's two-thirds of a bad movie, an ensemble movie where characters don't interact, collide or connect, and a superhero movie that forgets it has a villain right up until it's time for the climactic action.  The result is baffling.
Shy but sweet boy genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and her adrenaline junkie brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), gruff but loyal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a cyberpunk with a chip on his shoulder, are all part of a team working on a "Quantum Gate", a portal to open a pathway to a planet in a parallel dimension.  Learning that they will not be given the opportunity to experience the fruits of their labors by venturing onto "Planet Zero", they make their own unauthorized expedition, but it ends disastrously when the planet surface destabilizes.  Victor is left behind, presumed dead, while Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben only narrowly survive, but also transformed in their genetic makeup.  Reed's body now has enormous elasticity and can be reshaped at will.  Sue can make herself invisible and also create force fields, and Johnny can engulf his body in flames at will, which he can use to create projectile fireballs and fly.  The worst of it comes to Ben, not even a part of the official team, but brought on board as Reed's best friend.  He is made incredibly strong and virtually indestructible, but at the price of having his flesh transformed into rock.

The movie is a fair bit more interesting in the scenes prior to the Planet Zero expedition, when it's a loosely established and weird sci-fi drama.  This is an impressive cast, all of whom have done exceptional work in previous films and television; Teller, who starred in THE SPECTACULAR NOW in 2013 and WHIPLASH last year, gets to show a softer, sweeter side than we've seen before.  Although his character is thinly realized, Teller fairs better than his co-stars, with Mara, the under-appreciated highlight of House of Cards in its first season, and Jordan, one of the most talented and charismatic up-and-coming stars who gave a stellar performance in 2013's FRUITVALE STATION and will star in CREED later this year, are essentially non-characters.  Sue Storm is there to design the suits for the expedition, which isn't tied into any of her other two established character traits, those being an specialization in detecting patterns and a passion for music, the former which only comes into play once and is largely inconsequential.  Jordan gets the "doesn't play well with others" card, and his character is all but brushed aside in the latter half of the movie.  Even if the movie had been better overall, Bell is the only questionable casting choice, possibly chosen for his performance-capture experience as the title character in THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, as his character is CGI for the second half of the movie, but there's little that's actually intimidating about him.  He's more of an "angry little guy" type.  The CGI "Thing" is poorly designed too, and believe it or not, may provoke reconsideration of Story's heavily criticized practical makeup version played by Michael Chiklis.  Honestly, that looked a bit better. 

Kebbell is fine, but again, the character is poorly written, established with an unrequited interest in Sue, one that never comes into play in his motivations past his introduction.  When he returns late in the film as the Fantastic Four's arch-nemesis Dr. Doom, he looks cheap (an obvious but arguably overused comparison which applies here is that he looks like a Power Rangers villain) and use as a villain feels cheap, sudden and ill-conceived.
There are so many things wrong about FANTASTIC FOUR, in spite of its inherent potential, but at the dead center of it is a comprehensive lack of payoff.  From the early scenes of the film and then throughout, things are set up and... nothing.  In some sense, it feels like a great, bloated preview for something else, not because it's an origin story, but because after 94 minutes (not including credits) we've only seen a setup, and an initial conflict, a first and second acts, two patently detached parts of a three-part story structure.  Imagine if STAR WARS ended with Luke, Han and Leia escaping from the Death Star.  Imagine if the Lord of the Rings trilogy stopped after THE TWO TOWERS.  Imagine if those movies did that on top of being thinly written, off-pace and severely detached.  And it had such a cracking cast, too.

All images via 20th Century Fox

Review: PIXELS

PIXELS  (ACTION-COMEDY/SCI-FI) 
1 out of 4 stars 
Directed by Chris Columbus
Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Monaghan, Matt Lintz, Brian Cox, Sean Bean, Jane Krakowski, Dan Akyroyd, Affion Crockett, Lainie Kazan, Ashley Benson, Denis Akiyama, Anthony Ippolito, Jared Riley, Jacob Shinder, Andrew Bambridge
Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive comments.
105 minutes
Verdict: A dumb and distasteful Ghostbusters-knockoff, degraded further by rampant misogyny and "angry white male" culture, PIXELS may be a technical improvement on some of Adam Sandler's more recent fare, but not to its redemption.
YOU MAY ENJOY PIXELS IF YOU LIKED:
BEDTIME STORIES  (2008)
GROWN UPS 2  (2013)
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM  (2006)
CLICK  (2006)
BLENDED  (2014)

PIXELS desperately wants to be the new GHOSTBUSTERS, but insists on sticking primarily with the Happy Madison Productions bag of "tricks", making an already lofty goal comically out of reach.  In fact, that misguided ambition is one of the funnier aspects of this otherwise dull, dumb and horrifyingly sexist big budget special effects comedy.  To be fair, it's hardly Adam Sandler's worst film (a remarkably low bar set by 2011's JACK AND JILL), and it's actually some of the better fare he's turned out in recent years, but not to his credit nor to the movie's redemption.
Based on an internet short that went viral in 2010, the movie begins with a prologue set in 1982, in which an arcade games championship master of ceremonies played by Dan Akyroyd announces that the tournament, including games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede and Space Invaders, will be filmed to include in a time capsule containing images of Earth culture to be launched into space for the possibility of making peaceful contact with extraterrestrial life.  Now in the present day, it appears as if the capsule has been found by an alien race, but they've misinterpreted the video game images as a declaration of war, and are now sending an assault in the form of giant, physically realized versions of classic video games.  The only way to combat these attacks is to play the real life game, so the President of the United States (Kevin James) calls upon his best friend since childhood, Sam Brenner (Sandler), a former Pac-Man world champion who now installs home theaters for a Geek Squad-style company, to advise the U.S. military on how to beat the games.  Brenner puts together a team of "Arcaders", including sad sack conspiracy-theorist Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad) and former Donkey Kong world champion turned convicted scam artist Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage), as well as weapons developer/specialist Lt. Col. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan), and as Earth's only hope, they take part in a video game championship with intergalactic stakes.

Director Chris Columbus, returning for his first theatrical feature film since PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF in 2010, is not a great filmmaker, but he at least more talent and puts in a hell of a lot more effort than Sandler's usual go-to hack directors (Dennis Dugan and Frank Coraci), and with the exception of Sandler and James, has put together a pretty decent cast.  The concept even has promise, but the comedy, the characters, and the execution all ranges from tolerable to putrid swill, all led by an unlikable, lazy and detached performance by Sandler.  Sandler's brand of comedy has long been questionable, but he seems largely indifferent here, reading off lines as though someone were holding cue cards for him off-camera.  The only sense of Sam Brenner's character is conveyed through the script, and there's nothing endearing or likable about him.  He's a jerk with undue disdain for the people around him and a victim's mentality as he thumbs his nose any human decency.  Gad is more naturally endearing than Sandler, but unfortunately, even he is hopeless to elevate this material, reduced to playing a hodgepodge of nerd stereotypes lacking in rhyme or reason and alternating between frantic shouting and whimpering.  Dinklage comes off the best here, modeled after real-life Pac-Man world champion (and previous Donkey Kong world champion) Billy Mitchell, who was featured in the 2007 documentary KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS.  Dinklage hams it up to 11, and although most of the stuff he says and does is incredibly stupid, you have to admire the enthusiasm he brings to it.

If PIXELS were fun, it could be written off as "harmless fun", however, it is neither fun nor harmless.  In light of issues involving "Gamergate", the gaming community social movement that has organized serious harassment in the form of hacking and releasing of personal information such as home addresses, and issuing rape and death threats, in response to (primarily women) critics of the rampant misogyny and racism in online gaming culture, this remarkably misogynistic movie celebrating retrogaming feels particularly distasteful.  "Nerd culture" is now mainstream, but PIXELS snidely pits its specifically "white male nerds" against the world of women who don't appreciate them and big men who turn out to be sissies, while Sandler's entitled creep of a character badmouths everybody.  Women come off worst of all, with sobbing recent divorcees ridiculed as "snobby" for turning down a kiss from a stranger, the female lead somehow construed by the movie's point of view into being the judgmental one who just needs to open up to the men who treat her badly, and a sexed-up non-character with zero lines who is literally awarded to a male character as a trophy.  What this guys don't realize is that, to paraphrase a line from THE SOCIAL NETWORK, they think girls don't like them because they're nerds, but it's really because they're assholes.
PIXELS is a terrible movie, but it's not necessarily the most painful terrible movie to sit through.  It's clumsy, wasting the good things it has going for it, about them the better part of its cast, the well-sized budget and a solid premise.  Jumping from one confusingly edited video game set piece to another, the movie is never elevated above a feature-length special effects reel, and is, in fact, downgraded by rampant misogyny and awkwardly stupid jokes.  Oh, and Q*bert is super annoying.  Cue the kill screen.

Images via Sony Pictures Entertainment

Review: ANT-MAN

ANT-MAN  (ACTION-COMEDY/SCI-FI) 
2 out of 4 stars 
Directed by Peyton Reed
Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll, Bobby Cannavale, Micheal Pena, Tip "T.I." Harris, Wood Harris, Judy Greer, David Dastmalchian, Martin Donovan, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence.
117 minutes
Verdict: A disappointingly mediocre entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, pervaded by cheap comedic beats while shying away from the most interesting aspects of its premise, ultimately resulting in the most forgettable and dull installment in the MCU yet.
YOU MAY ENJOY ANT-MAN IF YOU LIKED:
THOR: THE DARK WORLD  (2013)
IRON MAN 2  (2010)
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON  (2015)
HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS  (1989)
DAREDEVIL  (2003)

ANT-MAN comes with a lot of baggage. Originally announced at Marvel Studios to be directed by Edgar Wright, critically-acclaimed writer/director of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, THE WORLD'S END and SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, it was an incredibly exciting prospect for the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" (MCU) that now includes the superhero series of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers, with more on the near horizon.  Then, during late pre-production in May 2014, it was announced that Wright was leaving the project due to the extremely vague and typical citation of "creative differences", and the air of excitement seemed mostly let out of it.  Wright has maintained a screenwriting credit with his co-screenwriter Joe Cornish, in addition to an executive producer credit, and the action set-pieces (at least, most of them) have Wright's hand in them as they had to be plotted out before everything else, but the director's reins have been handed to Peyton Reed, whose credits include BRING IT ON, THE BREAK-UP and YES MAN.  ANT-MAN is emblematic of a particular problem at Marvel Studios, one that first became apparent in IRON MAN 2 and clashed with writer/director Joss Whedon's vision in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON; the homogenizing of individual films to meet the needs of the larger story, rather than crafting the larger story around the individual films, and relying on the gimmicks of the system rather than the merits of the story and characters.

In ANT-MAN, comic actor Paul Rudd stars as Scott Lang, a burglar who's just been released from prison and now hopes to start anew by getting a legitimate job and becoming a consistent presence in his estranged daughter's life.  This proves more difficult than expected, and Lang returns to crime, stealing a suit that he discovers contains technology that shrinks the wearer down to miniscule size while enhancing his strength to a superhuman level.  The rightful owner and inventor of the suit, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), makes contact with Lang and with his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who resents Lang for the potential her father sees in him, they train him to be the superhero "Ant-Man", to best utilize the suit's powers and telepathically communicating with actual ants.  Pym's company, from which he's was ousted years ago, is now run by his old protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), and has now found a way to replicate the Ant-Man technology which Pym has fought to keep secret, and with any luck, Pym will have Lang ready in time to infiltrate the company building and steal the technology before it has a chance to fall into the wrong hands.
ANT-MAN relies more heavily on humor than any other Marvel movie to date, and unfortunately, it also has the lowest success rate in that respect.  With the exception of a few good laughs, the movie is filled with dull and cheap comedic beats (especially involving Pena's annoying sidekick character), and more unfortunately, a few gags with strong potential marred by broad execution.  Likewise, the action typically has more potential than is delivered, smartly written, but lacking the fine-tuning that would be preferable.

Rudd has proven time and again to be a solid supporting actor in comedies like ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY and THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, but he lacks the screen presence and magnetism to lead a film, leaving Douglas, whose character is the more interesting besides, to carry the brunt of the load.  Certainly, Douglas' character is the center of interest in these proceedings, attracting more conflict and possessing more complexity than the others, and where is character goes is more intriguing than even the central protagonist.  The lack of strong, interesting villains in the MCU has been well documented (always excepting Loki, although Red Skull, while lacking complexity, served CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER well), and Darren Cross, aka Yellowjacket, is another villain who is more a plot device than a character, and more unexpectedly, Stoll's mannerisms bring to mind Buster Bluth from Arrested Development.
Rather than a story built around its eponymous character, ANT-MAN is a safe, unremarkable story built around the MCU, laying the connections on thickly, but in a gimmicky sense rather than to advance the larger, multi-film plot in the manner that dragged down IRON MAN 2 and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON.
To be fair, for the average moviegoer, depending on how well they receive the film's humor, ANT-MAN is perfectly pleasant summer entertainment, nothing particularly impactful, but engaging enough in the moment.  In the broader scheme, it's harmless, but in the universe of Marvel films, it's arguably the most apparent symptom yet of the considerable creative flaws in the studio's increasing attempts to gentrify their individual films at the sakes of those films' individual souls.

Images via Marvel Studios

Review: MINIONS

MINIONS  (ANIMATION/COMEDY)

1.5 out of 4 stars 
Directed by Kyle Balda & Pierre Coffin
Featuring the Voices of: Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, Pierre Coffin, Michael Keaton, Allison Janney, Steve Coogan, Jennifer Saunders, Geoffrey Rush, Steve Carrell, Katy Mixon, Michael Beattie
Rated PG for action and rude humor.
91 minutes
Verdict: A frantic and dull exercise in strictly brand-based filmmaking that will no doubt amuse small children while parents are forced to grit their teeth.
YOU MAY ENJOY MINIONS IF YOU LIKED:
DESPICABLE ME 2  (2013)
DESPICABLE ME  (2010)
PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR  (2014)
HOME  (2015)
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER  (2015)

The little, yellow, pill-shaped imps called "Minions", which became the mascots of animation studio Illumination Entertainment and their hugely successful flagship franchise of Despicable Me movies, are absurdly popular, so it was only a matter of time before they got their own solo movie.  The level of cultural saturation the Minions have reached defies reason.  Remember when people posted inane, would-be clever/insightful statements on top of a nature background to social networking sites?  The backgrounds didn't make sense then, and the Minions that now accompany these statements don't make sense now.  You can't walk into a grocery store without seeing these characters on a couple of items, at the very least.  They're on Twinkies, bananas, Swiffer mops, breakfast cereal, McDonald's Happy Meals, board games, Amazon shipping boxes, Tic Tacs, apple sauce and paper towels, and that's hardly the sum of it; this brand is a marketing juggernaut.  Unfortunately, that may be the extent of the Minions' potential, because MINIONS, the movie, is nothing more than dull centerpiece to a massive marketing machine.
With narration by Geoffrey Rush, the shoestring plot takes us back to the very origins of Minions as single-celled organisms in the primordial soup before evolving into the gibberish-speaking, goggle-wearing, yellow creatures, and all throughout the millennia, they've wanted nothing more than to find the best villain to serve, consistently with dismal results.  By 1968, the Minions have made their home in the Arctic and sunken into depression due to their lacking of a sense of purpose, but Kevin, a relatively smart Minion, decides to venture out into the world and find a villainous master for their kind, accompanied by fellow Minions Bob and Stuart.  Arriving at Villain-Con, the villains convention, the Minions land jobs as henchmen for the hottest new baddie on the scene, Scarlet Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock), who wants them to steal Queen Elizabeth's (voiced by Jennifer Saunders) crown for her, and when things go awry, Scarlet tries to destroy them.

The plot is extremely thin, meandering through a series of loosely connected episodes in which the comedy relies very heavily on the title characters' signature gibberish, provided by co-director Pierre Coffin and comprised of a little English, a little French, a little Spanish, a little Italian and a fair bit of nonsensical babble.  Even with a running time of only 91 minutes, there simply is not enough here to sustain a feature film.  The Minions of the Despicable Me films were more like props than characters, used as fodder for slapstick gags, and they do not evolve from that role even as they're made the central focus of the film.  I'd say it's like having the Ark of the Covenant chasing down Indiana Jones, but that actually sounds pretty cool still, and MINIONS is more of a drudge.
Despite her best efforts, Bullock's casual vocals feel wrong in this kind of Looney Toons animation where she sticks out like a sore thumb amongst all the funny voices and even her own character's exaggerated rendering.  On the other hand, as Scarlett's groovy inventor husband Herb, Jon Hamm is the highlight of the film, and mind you, the highlight is Jon Hamm's vocal performance, not Illumination Entertainment's frustratingly static character types.  Of course, the practically non-stop Minion gibberish will drive most parents mad over the course an hour-and-a-half, not to mention the days of imitation by their children.
It's a movie most younger children will enjoy, however, for its bright colors and overall silliness, but even for those who enjoyed the Despicable Me films, it's hard to see what the average discerning adult will find to appreciate beyond the entertainment value for their little ones.  The humor is too broad (lots of 1960s pop culture references like hippies, The Dating Game and Richard Nixon) and even when a premise has potential, the execution never lives up to it.  Most of the genuinely funny stuff has already appeared in the trailers, and the best joke from the trailers doesn't even appear in the finished film.  It's a dull frenzy that fails to justify itself beyond what it truly is: a brazen advertisement for an already absurdly popular brand.