Atlantis and Treasure Planet Would Make Good Live-Action Remakes

I’ve had some thoughts about Disney’s recent live action remakes, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to write them up since The Lion King just came out recently and we’re coming off a four month stretch that saw three total release (and with two more coming in the next four months).

I have my issues with them, I guess. I usually get around to seeing them eventually, but none of them really strikes me as substantially better than the original. Maybe The Jungle Book, since it seemed to have more of a unified through-line the original? But the original was never one of my favorites growing up, so I haven’t seen it in years and might be remembering things incorrectly.

Really, I just don’t have strong feelings about any of them so far. But I know they’re going to keep coming since they make so much money, so I figured I’d throw in my two cents on what I would do, for at least a little bit (since that will clearly influence Disney CEOs and make them restructure all of their plans).

And really, my two cents boil down to “make live action versions of Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire”. And yeah, some of this is that those movies were two of my favorites growing up. But there are plenty of reasons I think remaking these two films specifically would be a good move outside of my personal nostalgia poisoning.

Meet the Robinsons Is Two Clicks Off of Being a Disney Classic

I love Disney movies (that may have been obvious already, not sure), and I love time travel movies (may not be as obvious), so I figured it was long overdo for me to revisit what remains to this day the only film in the Disney Animated Canon to tackle time travel, 2007's Meet the Robinsons.

The movie has kind of been forgotten, which maybe isn't too surprising; it did come out at a rather low point in Disney's history, after all, on the heels of a string of failures in the first few years of the millennium.* But, it came right before the turnaround that lead to the re-invigoration of the studio, where we find it today once again something of a juggernaut, and appropriately enough, contains a lot of very strong points in what's otherwise a solid but occasionally uneven movie.

*I don't feel like getting too into the nitty-gritty of each movie, but I feel like it's pretty safe to say the only unqualified success for the studio in the early 2000s was Lilo and Stitch. And while there were some good movies in that stretch that underperformed, I don't think I'll run into too much resistance in saying that the three films immediately preceding Meet the Robinsons, namely Chicken Little, Home on the Range, and Brother Bear, are all among Disney's weakest feature films.

Some Thoughts on Protagonists and Antagonists, via Cars 3

This is just going to be a short piece, but it’s something that bugged me while I was watching a movie, so I might as well put into words why I didn’t think it worked. It never hurts to think things through and try and learn from them.

I saw Cars 3 over the weekend, as part of my Pixar completionist streak, and was pleasantly surprised. In all honesty, I enjoyed Cars*, but don’t really remember anything about Cars 2, so my expectations going in were pretty tempered. Add in a pre-release campaign that seemed…unclear at best, and I think it’s fair to say that this was the least excited I had been for a new Pixar movies in a while.

*I don’t know if I’d put it all that high among Pixar’s in-studio rankings, but that’s as much a reflection on their strong track record as the movie itself.

In the end, the movie turned out mostly good. It will definitely stick in my brain longer than Cars 2 did, so at the very worst, so it has that going for it. However, there were just some minor complaints I had, most of which are tied to some of the thematic things going on. This will contain some light plot spoilers as a result.

Basically, it all boils down to this: the villains of the movie just don’t work. This isn’t the end-all, be-all, of course. The personal growth arcs of the main mostly work… except that they insist on using these “villains” as the end demonstration of that growth, which sort of undermines the arcs a little, in my opinion.

My Favorite Movies of 2016

For the first time in 2016, I kept a list of every movie that I watched.* It was mostly out of curiosity, after having one too many experiences saying “oh right, I totally forgot I saw that movie” (I do not have the best memory). The end result was that I reached January with a record of just about every movie I saw for the year and some vague notion that it would be worth writing about in some capacity. And the natural extension of that idea was to release some sort of year-end list.

*I would eventually expand it to other mediums as well, so maybe I’ll have another article or two up my sleeve.
However, it feels weird to call it a “best of” list, since there were so many movies from this past year that I didn’t get around to seeing. Meanwhile, a good chunk of the movies I saw this year were just me catching up on things from the past few years that I hadn’t seen. Not to mention that I don’t think that I’m enough of a film scholar to be able to definitely, objectively say one film is “better” than another. So, this list will more so be the films that I liked the most from 2016/the tail-end of 2015 (with a few other movies I saw for the first time this year thrown in), and with at least a couple thoughts on each one. If nothing else, some of these were the germs for full articles that I just couldn’t build off of; maybe finally writing them down will lead to more on them in the future?

Some Belated Thoughts on Big Hero 6 and Interstellar

It took me a while to see these two movies, and even longer to write down my thoughts on them, but I may as well do it. I’ll mark spoilers when I get to them.

It seems weird to think of these two movies as related; they’re about as different as you can get. They were released on the same day, and that’s about it (unless you want to count the fact that I saw them close together as another relation, in case you think my viewing pattern makes them more similar in some way). But I feel like these movies are so different that they almost represent polar opposites in some way.

Adaptations and Quality, Part 2

Last week, I wrote about adaptations and how faithfulness is second to quality. Since then, I’ve been thinking about my stance more and more. Which is good; part of the reason I write about these things is to reflect on my opinions and see if they hold up.

And in reflection, I feel like I might draw the line somewhere. I mean, it would be one thing to change the origin of a character to better fit in different take on an adapted universe. For Christopher Nolan’s Batman films; the more fantastic elements of Batman are gone (a super-drug that grants strength? Or a hole in the ground that resurrects people?). Or, see last week’s Iron Man example; gone is the traditional Mandarin, with ten magic space rings that don’t particularly fit in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not even getting into the unfortunate racial implications of the character, since he started as something of a stereotype).

But we have to draw the line somewhere, right? It might be unlikely, but let’s pose a hypothetical: since I’m a Spider-Man fan, let’s say Sony decides to scrap the Amazing movies and move in a totally new direction. Gone is the awkward-yet-well-meaning teen inventor Peter Parker; in his place is a violent gun-wielding 30-year-old vigilante defecting from a gang known as “The Spiders” who intends to clean up their crime ring.

Now, let’s ignore how bad that idea sounds (to be fair, that took me all of two minutes to come up with) and pretend that it becomes an actually good movie. Like I said, it’s always important to make a good movie first and an adaptation second. I stand by that; if you’re going to go through the trouble of creating anything, you might as well make it something good.