Robin Hood – (1973)
It’s weird to think of Disney in terms of anything other than a world-devouring mega-multi-billion dollar cartoon industry, isn’t it? Of course, I think it’s weird because I’m only thirty, and have never known a time when they weren’t in the business of marketing blockbusters. History speaks for itself, though: the real story of Disney’s animated film series is that everyone stood up and took notice when Walt himself pioneered the art form, then sort of sat back down for forty years while the studio chased its tail and tried to hammer out that magic formula of sustainability.
This is not to say there aren’t some quality films in that odd middle era. There certainly are, and Robin Hood is certainly one of them. I just think it’s useful to approach these offerings as Disney’s B-side. It’s like, nobody buys a Beatles album to hear George bust out a zither. If you were dividing the films up by tone, with all the comedies going into this box and all the romances going into that one, and so on, you’d be sort of at a loss for what to do with Robin Hood. I think “quaint” is a good word to boil it down to. There’s something soothing in that quaintness, a sort of purposely inoffensive charm, that causes the movie to be notable even though it does nothing in particular to stand out.
Man, I’m not doing a very good job making Robin Hood sound very appealing, am I? Let’s start here: this movie is great and I super duper love it. And I’m not the only one.
—
Oo-de-lally, what a day!
A few weeks ago I put up a friendly internet poll to find out what folks’ favorite Disney soundtracks were. Forum software being what it is I had to whittle the selection down to ten films, and being a forum full of twenty-thirty-somethings I stuck mostly to the Alan Menken soundtracks with Cinderella thrown in just to round things out. It was only a few posts before someone came along and put in an unofficial vote for Robin Hood.
Really, I should have known better. This wasn’t the first time a friendly conversation about Disney films caused Robin Hood to bubble to the surface, and quickly. No, it’s not in anyone’s top-five list, but at the same time it’s never far from anyone’s mind. This is an experiment you can conduct on your own in whatever web communities you haunt: strike up a general conversation about your favorite Disney movies, then wait and see how long it is before someone says, “Hey, anyone remember Robin Hood?” You might even be able to set your watch by it.
On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to be such a strange occurence. That’s kind of how these discussions go: “My nostalgia is better than your nostalgia.” Try having a conversation about the newest X-Men storyline without some neckbeard popping up to compare it to one he read back in the ’70s. It’s technically on-topic, but still a little strange, until the second guy chimes in with memories about the same story, and then the whole discussion veers off in that direction. It is the natural order of things. It’s practically Internet Law.
In this conversation, though, it’s nearly always Robin Hood. People just seem to have a wistful fondness for it, moreso than other Disney films of the era. It beats Sword in the Stone and The Aristocats by ten to one, at least. I’ve witnessed it surface independently on web forums, in IRC chats, in conversations with friends my age. When one of my dudes sat down to play Kingdom Hearts with me, back before anyone knew that game sucked, one of his first observations was, “Man, I hope this game has a  Robin Hood world.”
It didn’t. I don’t think any of the sequels did, either. I can’t help but wonder if Square hit a snag during their demographic research.
The fondness expressed for Robin Hood is not very strong, however. Everyone seems to have warm fuzzy feelings about it, but nobody lists it as their favorite. I think this might be a key piece of the puzzle: none of us were actually around for Robin Hood‘s theatrical release and the accompanying media blitz. None of us got a lute-playing plastic rooster in our Happy Meal, or a Little John bedspread. Nobody tapped THQ for a budget PlayStation title. When we watched Robin Hood, it was because we found a battered copy at Blockbuster after renting literally everything else in the store. To be honest, I don’t even remember when I first saw it. It was just this lingering presence that would creep up just often enough to remind me it was around. Commercials and movie posters never got the chance to tell me I would like it; I had to find that out on my own.
Was it the same for everyone else? I don’t know. And does that explain the fondness for this one film over its contemporaries? I don’t know that either. But it is important to remember that watching this movie today is a bit like stepping into a time machine, and that most everyone seems to regard it as a very pleasant trip.
—
My Brief Stint as an Almost-Furry
I was in 10th or 11th grade when I first played Suikoden. At that point in my development 90% of all my creative writing was done in the form of RPG scripts, meant to be plugged into a videogame someday. Each time I played a new RPG, my approach to structuring my next masterpiece would change somewhat. What Suikoden did was told the story of a war through the eyes of those at the front of the conflict, so of course I thought I might try my hand at that same story. It also eschewed the typical equipment system for a one man/one weapon setup, where each fighter had a favored weapon they could make stronger but never unequip. Suikoden never explained why its fighters did this, but I thought of a pretty good reason: if the heroes had a shorter lifespan than the typical human, they might devote their time to mastering one single weapon rather than learning many. And since I wasn’t in the mood to make up some kind of fantasy Nega-Elf, I decided the heroes in my story were going to be animals.
It wasn’t until I charted out who the heroes were and what they were like that I realized I was unconsciously transposing characters and ideas over from Robin Hood. The hero was a plucky young fox who fought for justice and chivalry etc. and was most adept at using a bow. Once I realized what I’d done I changed the bow to a whip and kept going. Other than that, it didn’t bother me very much that I’d just lifted a character wholesale from a children’s movie. (I ended up giving the bow to the hero’s chameleon sidekick.)
Once it was finished, I made the mistake of letting one of my friends read it, who told me she knew an artist who was “into that sort of thing”. So I let him read it too, thinking he would do a few drawings I could add to my folder for that magical day when I would totally make it into a for-real game. I had to skip math class because he took second lunch, and when I did I thought it was “kind of cool” that his backpack and all of his folders were covered in clippings from Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comics.
I was young and foolish. Seeing that today would cause me to walk very briskly in the other direction.
I gave him a brief description of the characters and I think we even talked a bit about Robin Hood. He agreed he would start with the demure magic-using squirrel. In a few days he turned in his work: my squirrel was now some manner of snow owl with enormous, ahem, hooters. Her wings were splayed out behind her while she clutched a staff in her very anatomically incorrect arms. And she was licking her beak in a rather suggestive manner.
The uncomfortable conversation with this gentlemen, pointing out everything he’d done wrong, made me wish I’d just gone and factored some polynomials. And yet, he wouldn’t back down from any specific point. Snow owls were sexier than squirrels, he said. And no, birds don’t have arms (certainly not in Robin Hood!), but giving her extra appendages allowed him more freedom to… I don’t know, do whatever. In fact, he was upset with me for not proclaiming it a work of art! That was about the extent of our working relationship.
When I complained about this to one of my dudes online, I was told that I had met my first furry. “My first what?” And then, oh the things I did see. I realized I had looked into the crack of a door that led to a very dark place, and I turned my back on it. I was too embarrassed to even watch Robin Hood for many years. (I did manage to get back into Suikoden, though.)
That is, of course, unfair to Robin Hood. When I eventually did go back to it, after its DVD release, I was actually impressed that the characters were much less anthropomorphic than I remembered. Robin walks on his hind legs, sure, and speaks with an English accent, but he’s also got fangs and claws, and can move like a fox when he has cause to. He’s not just a person with a snout and red fur. This is, of course, right in line with most of Disney’s more realistic animal characters. If anything,  Robin Hood is proof that there is a place in the world for stories about human-like critters having fun adventures without descending through that dark door leading to fursuits and Sonic recolors.
—
“We folks of the animal kingdom have our own version…”
It’s kind of dumb to compare Robin Hood to the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog when there are a couple hundred other versions of the story already floating around to compare it to instead. The movie even acknowledges this right up front, when Alan-A-Dale the rooster minstrel informs us that what we’re about to watch is “the story of what really happened in Sherwood Forest”. Other than Tarzan, I can’t name another Disney movie that was based on such a ubiquitous and well-trodden story as Robin Hood. For generations, the modern face of the fairy tale had already been Disney, and the ones they hadn’t gotten to yet (like Aladdin and The Little Mermaid) were at least slightly obscure. But Robin Hood? Everyone knows Robin Hood!
If you held me down and forced me, on pain of death, to say whether I’d seen Disney’s version or Kevin Costner’s Prince of Thieves first, I wouldn’t be able to answer you. But it doesn’t matter. Because even at that very young age, I understood that these were just different takes on the same story, which I was already familiar with. Not very many Disney movies attack their stories from the direction of “this won’t be the first time the audience has seen this.”
You can usually define a Robin Hood story by what gets cut out of it. Disney’s version omits the origin story entirely, opening up with Robin in the woods already a wanted criminal. All the religious trappings of medieval England have been excised. The villains were recast to be bumbling and foolish, more the better to tell a whimsical children’s story. And, of course, all the characters were made into adorable woodland creatures.
From there, the story goes exactly as you’d expect: Robin Hood and Little John are lovable vagabonds who steal from the rich and give to the poor. “Rich” in this context refers to Prince John exclusively, and the stealing happens over the course of three adventures: a treasure carriage on its way to Nottingham, the legendary archery competition where Robin competes in disguise, and finally an invasion of Prince John’s castle, simultaneous with a daring jailbreak. Along the way Robin manages to share a few tender moments with a local rabbit family and, of course, a blossoming romance with the Maid Marian.
In other words, you sort of have to know how the notes of the song go in order to listen along. The movie doesn’t spend any time introducing the characters or their relationships because it assumes you already know who they are and what they’re playing at. And really, who needs their hand held through the finer points of Robin Hood? Folklore is folklore for a reason.
This isn’t Disney’s usual approach to covering explored territory. In Tarzan, we still got the full brunt of the character’s origin and upbringing, and the major characters had been changed considerably from their original versions. Well, at least enough to put a new spin on the tale. With the rest of their adaptations of literature and classic fairy tales, Disney usually likes to pretend they’re telling the story for the first time… to own their interpretation as something new and unique. Robin Hood alone goes entirely the opposite direction.
The result is something like comfort food. The heroes feel more like old friends, the villains are rounded off and non-threatening. The setting is a place we’ve been to before, and enjoyed before… and isn’t that what we were expecting? Why else would you pick up a copy of Robin Hood with a cartoon fox on the cover? Everything about the film, all the warmth and simplicity of it, reminds you that this really isn’t Disney’s story — they’re just borrowing it for a while.
I wonder if the decision to do this was a conscious thing, a sort of shift in direction after more played-straight versions of Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book. Maybe someone stood up and said, “Guys, we’re not going to be able to pass Robin Hood off as one of ours, so let’s just have fun with it.” Or maybe it just happened naturally? Maybe Robin Hood is just the kind of story you start out with, “You’ve heard it before, but this is what really happened…”
—
“Alms… alms for the poor…”
The first thing I did when I decided to write this article series was sit down and do some basic research on the history of Disney movies. Since I’m lazy and live on the internet, “basic research” in this context means “I read a lot of Wikipedia and IMDB”. I have a handy spreadsheet here with the release dates, running time, budget and box office gross of every film from Snow White to Tangled, which comes in handy when comparing the current spotlight film to other films in the series, and to other films near it in the timeline. For example, I know that Robin Hood is the first feature film Walt Disney himself had no involvement in; he lived just long enough to see half of The Jungle Book‘s production, and to sign off on The Aristocats.
 But you don’t have to be a Wikipedia junkie to see the cost-cutting measures employed by Robin Hood. It’s somewhat infamous for its use of traced animation, lifted wholesale from previous films to save the animators some trouble. And you don’t really have to squint to notice that the bear, snake and buzzard characters were imported directly from The Jungle Book.
My knee-jerk reaction to this is, well, animation in the 1970s was a pretty sorry affair. My apologies if you’re ten years older than I am, but you grew up during a time when most cartoon studios didn’t aim higher than “loud colorful noises to get kids to shut up”. We should consider it a minor miracle that Disney produced anything of value during that decade at all, and just move on.
What’s weird is, the numbers don’t add up. Robin Hood‘s budget of $15 million is still pretty pricey compared to The Aristocats‘s $4 million, three years prior. And both are extravagent when compared to The Rescuers, made four years later, for a scant $1.2 million. Why does Robin Hood have this reputation as a budget film, made during one of Disney’s more prominent financial downswings, if it wasn’t particularly cheap to make? And if a shoestring budget wasn’t necessary, why all the cost-cutting measures?
Either these numbers aren’t correct, perhaps the product of some overzealous independent research that got quickly cross-referenced to every website on the internet, or film production is a labyrinth of arcane secrets that I can’t possibly begin to unravel. Or heck, I still haven’t seen The Rescuers — maybe it looks like some straight-up Hanna-Barbera garbage compared to Robin Hood.
The salient question is, does any of this stuff about traced artwork and lifted characters actually impugne Robin Hood‘s quality? I don’t think it does. In fact, when you only know the movie as part of a nebulous “old, but not that old” era of Disney films, it sort of gives the impression that they simply had a stock of animal characters to draw from. Which, if you consider how many hats Mickey Mouse has worn over the years, is sort of true.
—
Hmm… I seem to have spent more time in this article skirting around the perimeter of Robin Hood than talking about the movie proper. I think I hit the major points, though: it is the story of Robin Hood, it features a cast of woodland creatures, and there are a damnable lot of people who feel its legacy is worth more than “that movie the hamsterdance song comes from”.
Going back to my original question, I think I know what box I’d put Robin Hood in: just plain fun. The movie doesn’t deliver overmuch, but it doesn’t ask very much from you, either. It’s got that intangible quality that just seeps into you and makes you want to like it. It probably won’t knock your socks off — it didn’t provide me with an opportunity to run to the Xbox achievement generator — but next time you find yourself inexplicably engrossed in a nostalgic conversation about Disney movies, could be you’ll be the one to say, “Hey, anyone else remember Robin Hood?”
I wasn’t going to say anything about Super RMN Bros. 3 on my blog, because the game sucks and their response to criticism has not changed since Super RMN Bros. 2, but I recieved an interesting new perspective on the situation that I feel is worth mentioning. So here I am mentioning it.
Really, this post is about Super Talking Time Bros. 2, more than anything. Putting these two community-driven Mario fangames up against each other in a sort of nerdhole internet grudge match actually makes a lot of sense to me, because one is a fine example of what can be achieved when a community with a clear goal can really accomplish, while the other, uh, isn’t. STTB2 is worthy of every ounce of praise you could possibly give it. People are not exaggerating when they say it’s better than some of Nintendo’s own work. Miyamoto would play this game and nod appreciatively that, yes, these guys really do get it. If the TT guys were Nintendo employees, and they sold you this game for $50, you would not begrudge them a penny.
Let’s start with this premise: a single person cannot make a really good game. Now we know that obviously isn’t universally true, or else the world wouldn’t have gems like Cave Story in it, but the trick is so rare I think it’s fair we can discount it as a fluke of genius. So okay, if you’re a genius you can maybe make a good game all by yourself, but most of us aren’t geniuses. I certainly know I’m not, and I know neither the TT nor RMN project leaders are, nor are any of the dudes who submitted levels. Basically we’re all just gibbering ape-creatures who like Mario a lot, and can maybe tie our shoes by ourselves on a good day, and need to have the crust cut off of our sandwiches, etc.
So with that in mind, we turn to the goals of the two competing internet communities, these congregations of ape-creatures who have come together in the conceit that they could pretend to make a Mario game. And this is the new perspective: Talking Time is a community of gamers, whereas RMN is a community of hackers.
I’ve put about five-ish years into Talking Time so far, and what I like about the community there as opposed to other gaming communities I’ve tried out is that the people like to talk about games. You would think that’s obvious (I mean, it’s in the forum title and all) but it’s really not. The dudes there don’t just talk about what they’re playing and what’s coming out and what new system will have the most chips or whatever. What they talk about is why they play games. You very nearly never have a dude just roll up all, “This fucking game sucks!” If a fucking game sucks, that dude is going to tell you why that fucking game sucks, and usually support his position with examples of games that did what that fucking game was trying to do better. Or ideas on how the fucking sucky parts could have been improved. And then a second dude will come along and disagree; he’ll make a case for why the game doesn’t fucking suck, and support that argument with generally sound reasoning about why he thinks that. And these two guys, even though there is no common ground re: fucking-sucking, are actually engaging in a real discussion about game design.
I have about ten years’ worth of experience in the various RPGMaker communities, of which RMN is just the most recent example, and I say with confidence that it is a totally different style of discourse. The community isn’t centered around playing games, but rather making them, and so everyone has an individual agenda. Everyone is making something, and they all want you to play it. And yes, that means playing the stuff other people make too. And yes, you can actually get a lot of enjoyment from that angle. What happens, though, when you have a hundred guys all using the same game engine to do things, is the conversation becomes skewed. When everyone knows what an engine can and can’t do, the level of expectation gets lowered. Mistakes are forgiven if everyone agrees it’s just a quirk of the engine, and truly novel things nobody has seen an editor do before are praised even if they are bad ideas.
(Indeed, one of the most explosive conversations I had about RMN Bros. 2 occured because I asked a level designer to add a checkpoint to a level, and I was rebuffed because it was impossible to do so. “Make the level shorter, then” was not even considered as a solution to the problem.)
Now when you get these groups together, as a community, to design a Mario game, it’s actually pretty clear why one consistently succeeds and the other consistently fails. Both communities are just doing what comes naturally to them. The TT guys get together and engross themselves in discussion about every level, discussions which sometimes blow up and hurt feelings. If a guy’s level doesn’t work, he’s forced to read lots of comments about why it doesn’t work and, in extreme cases, why it won’t be included in the project. Bad levels get weeded out and bugs get squashed at nearly every point in the process because these are guys who like to talk about games. They just happen to be talking about their own game, this time.
Meanwhile, at RMN, every contributor is ostensibly a game designer. The game thus becomes a collection of individual projects being plugged into the whole. A guy makes his level off in his own corner, then presents it when he’s done, and then goes off to make the next level. And because a “standard” SMBX level is old hat, each individual is trying to push the engine to do more novel things, without regard to whether those are really the kinds of things that work well inside of a Mario game.
These are two groups of people who have a healthy respect for gaming, just in different directions. Talking Time is interested in gaming as a culture, as a form of history. They would have deep discussions about SMBX whether they were making a game or not. Their project, then, is chock full of references and in-jokes, little nods to Mario history, and every brick has been pored over not just for bugs, but to ensure that fun, playability and “Mario-ness” were adhered to all along the way.
RMN is interested in gaming as more of a hobby, an avenue of creative output. They like to put pieces together to see what happens. To them, the simple act of making their own Mario level is worthwhile without acknowledging any higher goal. That a level isn’t very Mario-like is less of a concern, because they get to make a cool thing and share it with their friends, who are also making cool things.
What I’ve learned during my time at Talking Time, and what these quasi-yearly Mario projects continue to reinforce for me, is that the process of making a good video game begins with a willingness to really dig in and challenge everything you think you know about game design. 99.9% of everyone who has ever enjoyed a Mario level has not thought about why they enjoyed it. Understanding why you like the things you like is a skill you have to learn and develop. It’s something I was not very good at myself for a very long time. By its very nature, the Talking Time forums help develop that skill, whereas RMN bypasses it and goes directly to the technical aspects of using game editing software.
And no, merely playing games isn’t enough to develop this ability. A truly well-designed game is built specifically so you won’t notice the game-y aspects of it. If you don’t believe that’s true, turn on the developer commentary in Portal sometime and prepare to have your mind blown. (Here’s a hint, for you visitors from RMN: a lot of the level design that went into that game was directly influenced by player feedback.)
Homework assignment: write 500 words about why the first level in Super Mario Bros. is so good. Or so bad, if you don’t like it. And no filler; I can spot filler a mile away.
Talking Time is like a nebula of game designers. The guys there who really dig their hands in and really engage in the forum’s mission statement of “talking about television games” are, whether they know it or not, getting a powerful education. Super Talking Time Bros. is the proof. When you spend your free time making a case for the games you love and then defending that case against other dudes who do not love them, you become something more than just another ape-creature. A year or so later, when you sit down to make a Mario level, your first thought is, “Okay. What do I really know about Mario levels? What do I know works? And how can I put a little of myself into one?”
That’s the big difference between “Oh cool, a stopwatch! I should make a stopwatch level!” and “What would a stopwatch level look like, and how would it actually play? If it doesn’t play well, is there a way I can make it worthwhile?”
I can say, sincerely, that I am honored to know the guys who made the TT Mario games. It isn’t just better than RMN Bros., it’s head and shoulders above just about every Mario fangame ever made. And truth be told, I was more than a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t see my own name in the credits. I should have made a ghost house or something.
And to you RMN types, well, not that you’ve ever taken my advice in the past, but… you’re not hopeless. You just need to grasp that one important lesson you haven’t learned yet. Step one is realizing that the dudes at the front of the project — yes, I’m talking specifically about halibabica and kentona here — haven’t learned it either. Listen to criticism, be willing to throw away a week’s worth of work, and pay no attention to any positive thing anyone says about what you’re doing. If the TT guys do another sequel this year, I invite you to get a forum account and test your mettle there. Dart Zaidyer will whip you into shape.
It’ll sting, too. That fucker uses an actual whip.
But your levels will be better, scars and all.
If you’re an impartial observer, but you love Mario games, please download Super Talking Time Bros. 2 and Super RMN Bros. 3 for yourselves and make your own conclusions:
Super Talking Time Bros. 2
Super RMN Bros. 3
 There were no good videogames this month, so I put my gaming budget towards a copy of the Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game Boxed Set. It was an interesting purchase. I love the setting of Mouse Guard and hope it sticks around long enough to take up a whole shelf in my house. And I loved the idea of a roleplaying game in this setting, because it’s got a unique feel that betrays the traditional “swords’n'sorcery, kill’n'loot” gameplay agenda. The heroes would be brave and strong, sure, but they would be mice. Mice do not slay monsters and amass gold. They do not blaze trails and explore dungeons. They scamper and retreat, climb and hide and trick. They scratch what life they can at the very bottom of the food chain. That’s the angle the comics have portrayed very well, and that’s a kind of roleplaying game I really think would be worth playing.
Having just finished reading the rulebook, I’ve concluded it’s a pretty simple and well-designed game. I bet it plays really well. I know, though, that it will never go over with my gaming group, or with any group that is at all similar to ours. It’s very clearly aimed towards novice groups who are new to roleplaying, or veteran groups who have only played one type of game. There is a lot of structure here, and not enough of the bolts and crossbeams are covered up. It’s too game-y. There are lots of spots in the rules, as written, where I can envision players being frustrated by too much “you can’t do that, just because.” There are a lot of really good roleplaying tools built into the system, but most of the mechanics require the players to approach the system as a game and not necessarily as a world their characters can interact with. What’s worse, the system doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room to chock those restrictive mechanics aside.
My goal is to try and tweak the Mouse Guard rules so they will work for a veteran group that doesn’t need the kinds of rule-game-check restrictions that are built so solidly into its framework.
I’ll talk about the good stuff first, because the good stuff is really good and, more to the point, is the kind of good stuff that was noticably absent from 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. First, character creation is excellent. Every other game in the world seems to work under the assumption that every player has a copy of the book and therefore it’s okay to spend twenty minutes picking skills and spending points and notating abilities. If everyone does have a copy of the book, yeah, that process takes twenty minutes. This only happens if you’re playing a really old game that a lot of group members are familiar with, though. We have about six copies of the 2nd edition AD&D Player’s Handbook. But for a new game that one guy wants to introduce everyone else to? You usually just have his copy, and every player has to spend twenty minutes with it. An hour and a half later you can start playing. (Forty-five minutes if you print out a pirated .pdf of the rules.)
In Mouse Guard, character creation is structured as a series of questions. The GM goes down the list and the entire group (called a “patrol”) answers at once. The lists of skills and traits are broken down into sections that make logical sense: what skills were you born with? What skills did you get from your parents? Each group only has a subset of the whole skill list. Instead of poring over every available option and trying to balance them against each other, you’re instead just sharing your character’s backstory and letting the book fill in the dots for you. I bet it flows really well and gets a whole group up and running in just a few minutes. Gear is abstracted down to a Resources stat plus whatever the mouse can actually carry, which, being a mouse, isn’t much. I like games where characters are defined by who they are rather than what they can do, and that’s the kind of game Mouse Guard is.
Once you have your skills and such, you level them up by actually using them. Each skill has checkboxes next door to notate passes and failures. Passing a skill test represents getting better with practice; failure imparts important lessons. Both are required to get to the next level. This system is elegant and it rewards players for coming up with creative ways to use their skills. In point-based games you often reach a level where you have enough dots in a skill to pass almost every test you’ll ever make with it, but not enough to do anything really exceptional with it. In World of Darkness this is about four dots. Buying that fifth dot is almost prohibitively expensive; it takes something like three full sessions’ worth of XP. So you want to buy it, but you also don’t want to buy it, and argh frustrating. In Mouse Guard you get out of that boring middle range by seeking out riskier and more difficult applications of the skill. You’ll rack up your passes just by using it naturally, and rack up failures by purposely trying cool new things. And eventually you’ll skill it up.
(World of Darkness, in particular, is pretty bad about ever rewarding really risky behavior. Or maybe our GM’s just a total cocknose.)
The rest of your rewards all come through good roleplaying. Over the course of the game you stack up Fate and Persona points, which can be cashed in to improve rolls. You gain these points by staying true to several aspects of your mouse’s personality: his Belief, Goal and Instinct. I won’t go into detail about what these actually are, but understand there is almost no mechanical application for them. They are strictly defined by what’s in your head. These are not things you pick out of a list in a book, they are statements you make about what your character believes and how he acts. “I believe there is good in everymouse,” or “I never give up the high ground.” At the end of each session the group discusses everyone’s roleplaying and, if you’ve done well, you get points.
The game is also divided into seasons, with maybe one or two missions in each season. The Mouse Guard retires for the winter, and there are very nice rules set aside for how to conduct a Winter Session. This is essentially sped-up downtime where the players get some free points and acknowledge changes in how their mice have grown over the previous year. If a patrol can forego the downtime and volunteer for extremely deadly winter missions, if they really want, but otherwise winter is a great way to decompress and have the characters grow. I think every game needs something like this, and I liked that Mouse Guard specifically set rules aside for it.
So that’s what I liked. Now on to what I hated.
The game is broken up into alternating phases called “GM’s Turn” and “Players Turn”. I made sure to read this section twice through, very carefully, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how this distinction helps the game. The idea is that the GM’s Turn is the mission proper, where the patrol encounters obstacles, gets into fights, works towards their goals, etc. The Players Turn takes up the in-between spots where there is downtime; it’s used to rest and recuperate, obtain supplies, tie up dangling sidequests, etc. In theory it sounds like a good setup for novice players: the GM controls the first half of the session, then you Do Something Cool and then the players take over for a while. However, I anticipate a lot of problems with the system in practice. I am positive my group would reject it outright, and even if I were simply playing the game with another group I would feel unfairly restricted by it.
The major burning question is, why can’t the players just do whatever they want, wherever they happen to be? Sure there is an implicit agreement that the players are a patrol of guardsmice who are working on orders, but why can’t they decide to abandon their mission partway through and go do something else? The book is very clear that once the GM sets an obstacle before them, the players must attempt to clear it. I tried to find an alternate reading of this, something that didn’t sound quite so much like “the players must do what the GM wants them to do”, but there doesn’t seem to be one. After all, it’s the GM’s Turn, isn’t it? You make his checks and then jump through his hoops and dance when he says dance.
I realize a lot of groups play all their games this way. Particularly D&D groups that run on modules. “You can’t do that because it’s not allowed” is an acceptable statement in such groups. But try it with my group and you would be crucified. Our games still have structure, but we feel it’s the GM’s job to make us want to do the things he wants us to do, and to not penalize us when we want to do other things that are reasonable. In fact, we actively mock our GM when the plot threads are too blatant: “Hey look! A sign! It says, ‘plot, this way’! I guess I go that way.”
Mouse Guard is eerily silent on how to handle these situations; it simply assumes if the patrol faces a challenge, they will attempt to overcome it. If the GM gives them a fire to put out, the players will dutifully come together to douse it. And while there’s nothing really wrong with that, there’s also nothing wrong (in my opinion) with the players deciding to wait until the fire burns out. Or to try and go around it. Or to throw their Mouse Guard cloaks into it and form a den of bandits. Or to start the fire in the first place.
Okay, so the patrol puts out the fire or whatever, and now the tables are turned; they’re allowed to do whatever they feel like, and the GM can’t spring new plotlines or challenges on them. But ah, there’s a catch! The players still aren’t in total control, because they can only take a certain amount of actions during the Players Turn! During the GM’s Turn they amass “checks”, and taking an action in the Players Turn requires one check. If you’re thirsty and need to hit a tavern? That’s a check. If your shield needs repaired, that’s a check. You get one free check per Players Turn, and you earn more by purposely harming yourself during the GM’s Turn. You get one check for reducing your dice pool on a skill test by one. You get two for letting your opponent win a tie. If you don’t do any of those things, and only have one check by the time you hit town? Too bad. You only get to do one thing.
It gets worse. A player cannot spend two checks back to back, so if you have five and I have three you just don’t get to use one of yours. Oh, you can give me the extra one so I can take an action I didn’t earn, I’m sure that won’t cause any sour feelings in the patrol. (I’m also sure it won’t bog down gameplay during the GM’s Turn: “Dude! Lower your dice so you get a check! I gave you two last time!” “What? No! Fuck off.” “Fine, then I’m not giving you any more checks!” “Fine, then I’m not spending any more of mine on plot stuff!”)
The whole checks system is totally arbitrary and stupid. There is no in-world reason explaining why difficult rolls translate into more downtime, and absolutely no explanation for why guardsmice can’t simply use their downtime as they see fit. If there are more than two players you can run into ridiculous situations where two players have lots of checks and one only has a few. The player with a few has to sit there and watch the other two guys take turns for a while. “So we were in town for three days. During that time they were able to eat, get drunk, hire a cartographer and restock their ammo. But you’re telling me I had so little time I had to choose between getting a good night’s sleep and getting my spear repaired?” Obviously in these situations it’s better for one player to give another player a few spare checks. In fact, it’s probably best to just make sure all the players distribute their checks so they’re equal as soon as they hit town. And if you’re going that far you might as well just say “Do what you need to do in town, let me know when you’re ready for the next adventure,” and do away with checks completely.
Checks do have another function: you can use them to boost dice rolls during the GM’s Turn. This is actually quite powerful; with a certain ability you can cash in four checks to reroll all the failed dice on any test. That’s pretty nice, but if you’ve ditched the Players Turn system and this is the only thing to spend checks on players are simply going to accumulate them on the easy rolls to bypass the hard ones later. That sort of equals out, and players already have points to spend on boosting their rolls, so you might as well do away with this system too.
There’s another hidden snake in this whole GM/Player Turn system: since challenges and obstacles can only be presented during the GM’s Turn, you lose an all-important element of surprise. When I’m playing, I like the feeling that the next adventure or plotline can erupt at any moment, from any direction. If you’ve agreed to this whole Players Turn conceit, though, the GM is agreeing to not do that. In a game where the players can do whatever they want, it’s okay to spring weasels on them while they’re shopping because they can always shop later. In a game where players have to spend a resource to go shopping, springing weasels is mean and unfair. Not only do they not get to do their shopping, but the don’t get another chance to shop until after the weasels and whatever adventure they’re linked to are dealt with. And only if they’ve accumulated more checks along the way.
I have reservations with the combat system, too. Or maybe I should say the “combat” system, as Mouse Guard is one of those games that tries to downplay combat in favor of other sorts of conflicts. D&D 4e tried this too, with its skill challenges, and the result was somewhat clumsy. The secret to “combat” in games like this, though, is that as long as it flows quickly and gets the job done it sort of doesn’t matter how well it works. Mouse guard does away with time-consuming things like initiative rolls, hit points, magic spells and attacks of opportunity. That sounds insane at first, and maybe it is. I might have to just write up another post about it once I’ve seen the system in action.
In any event, having the roleplaying game handy has inspired me to go back and re-read Peanut’s copies of the Mouse Guard hardbacks. These books are not great writing, but the artwork is exquisite and the author is clearly very passionate about the little world he’s created. It’s the type of setting that inspires you to look for reasons to love it. When I passed my copy of the roleplaying game over to our group’s chief cynical cocknose, his first reaction was, “I already love this picture.” So maybe there’s hope for us yet.
If nothing else, Mouse Guard would make a great stand-in for one-shot adventures as part of a less-filling game night. We have a need for those once in a while. Maybe we can piggyback a two hour session into an evening of Mansions of Madness or Castle Ravenloft sometime.
The vlogbrothers set up this website, readit1st.com, where you can make a pledge to not see a movie until you’ve read the book that movie is based on. I felt this pledge carried two very strong advantages:
1) Whether the book is better or not, it is certainly the denser of the two versions, which means you get a more complete sense of the story and are therefore provided enough context to later enjoy the sensory overload of the movie. I’m the type of guy who finds himself enjoying movies more on the second pass, because if I’m relaxed and not focused exclusively on absorbing the plot I can notice all the other little things movies do that please me. (I’m also the type of guy who always watches DVDs with the subtitles turned on, for exactly the same reason.)
2) Peanut is always wanting to drag me to the movies, and I sort of don’t ever want to go because movie theaters are terrible places to go in a universe where waiting two months allows me to purchase the same film for an equivalent amount of money which I can then play on a theater-quality flatscreen HDTV. Also, we have better snacks. “Whoops, I haven’t read the book,” is an efficient way to get out of an otherwise unenjoyable evening.
Since that time I’ve had to spring that excuse on Peanut twice. And I read some other stuff in between, too.
—
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America by Jeff Ryan
I accidentally purchased this book while trying to buy one called Game Over: How Nintendo Slaughtered America’s Youth and Drank the Wailing Souls of the Damned, or something. I had heard the book had since been re-branded with a somewhat less soul-drinking name, but couldn’t remember what it was at the office at 5am when I was hankering to read a book, so I ended up with this one instead.
I wasn’t disappointed, though. What I got was essentially a history book that tells the story of Nintendo by focusing on the birth and evolution of its biggest superstar. It’s weird to think of videogames in terms of needing a history book, but sure enough, they do. It covers Nintendo’s early forays into arcade cabinets, to its runaway success with Donkey Kong, to the company’s daring swoop into the barren landscape after the 1983 crash, to its stumbling through the years dominated by optical media, and finally to its revolutionary new console with movement-based input that amazed grandmas everywhere but left many gamers yawning. It’s all in here. Maybe not put quite so cynically. Heh.
There were a lot of interesting stories in here I had never heard before, or at least not heard in detail. Such as the details of Nintendo’s legal battles with Universal over the use of Donkey Kong. Or how Nintendo’s president wanted to market the SNES to businessmen as an online communications machine. And it reinforced some things I’ve suspected for years, but never researched. For example, it kind of blew my mind to read that the technology to build a 16-bit console actually available in 1985, and Nintendo opted not to use it because an 8-bit console would be more affordable. Remember when the Wii came under a lot of criticism for being a non-HD console, and how it sold six quadrillion units anyway? That’s been Nintendo’s business strategy all along.
Towards the end of the book the author starts getting a little misty-eyed about looking forward to the future of videogames. He fenced gamers off into three categories, defined broadly be era: the arcade stickers, who got into gaming with Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, who see games primarily as tests of skill; the d-padders, who started playing on the NES, SNES or PlayStation, who view games more as a singular experience to be absorbed and enjoyed (this would be my generation); and the waggle-o-trons, who view games as slight diversions with minimal input, made popular with motion controls or touchscreens. Mario, of course, is one of the very few videogame archetypes that works well in all three divisions. There’s a heated internet debate to be had on the subject, but it was a nice way to end the book. If nothing else, I felt whatever craving my brain had for gamer books had been fulfilled by Super Mario and didn’t immediately go back seeking Game Over. I suppose that’s a complement.
—
World War Z by Max Brooks
I don’t care what the jaded-ass forum monkeys say, zombies are not played out. They are not just a silly internet meme along the lines of BACON CHEESE PIRATES. Zombie stories are compelling and terrifying, and can be told a thousand different ways. I don’t think I could ever get tired of them. I think what these people are missing, these “zombies are old and cliché now” people, is that the zombie itself isn’t the climax. Nobody writes a story about zombies. Zombies are the premise. It’s like, you wouldn’t look at sci-fi and say, “Oh, those are just stories about outer space. Outer space is so played out.” No. Of course not. You start with outer space, and then you jump off and tell your story. Zombies are a genre now. It’s like, “Suddenly, ZOMBIES!!” And then, “Okay, now what?”
From there the stories deviate into a few different directions, depending on whether the story is a drama or a comedy or a horror, but they almost universally focus on a small group of people right at the flashpoint of the outbreak. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there are still a million stories to tell that start that way, but what World War Z does is pulls the camera back and tells the story of a global zombie outbreak from a macro scale. It starts with the flashpoint, works its way into the government cover-ups and the mass hysteria, moves on to humanity collecting its shit and mounting the counter-offensive, and finally describes how much different the post-zombie world is, culturally speaking.
The book is written as a series of interviews of people from all walks of life who survived the zombie apocalypse. The premise is that the author (that is, the fictional author compiling the data, not the actual author) has a lot of stories left over from a historical account of the war he was putting together which were deemed too emotionally-charged to be put in the final cut. So instead of getting the dry, matter-of-fact textbook version, we get the biased, gory, unbelievable Real Talk version. And by god was it entertaining.
I was constantly impressed by how many details got worked into this book. I mean, little things that would necessarily happen as the result of a worldwide zombie uprising which are always overlooked in zombie stories. Real bottom-of-the-closet stuff. For example, when the US army finally starts fighting back, its uniforms are these warm, practical things that resemble Civil War uniforms. And why not? Zombies don’t care about camouflage. And wouldn’t there be cases of young children losing their parents but surviving somehow themselves? Wouldn’t you have to set up some infrastructure to care for these feral children after things calmed down? The book covers that eventuality. Or, wouldn’t the cultural and political differences of countries around the world handle the outbreak in totally different ways? Of course they would. China attempts to cover the story up far past the point of practicality. Russia executes soldiers that want to desert to be with their families. South Africa implements an extremely controversial countermeasure that draws a lot of fire due to being similar in spirit to Apartheid. American celebrities huddle together in a mansion, guarded by a private para-military security force, and are the victims of their own hubris when they try to broadcast their co-existence as an internet reality show.
Finishing this book left me wanting more incredible zombie stories. Unfortunately there aren’t very many zombie novels out there, so…
—
The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks
…I was instead forced to re-read The Zombie Survival Guide. This would be the dry, matter-of-fact textbook stuff that World War Z doesn’t include. It is essentially just a how-to book for surviving zombies. What more can be said, really? It’s not an amazingly entertaining read — what how-to book is? — but having a fictional threat being examined in such a detailed, realistic and practical way just creates this bizarre sense of fascination that is impossible to resist.
What I’m saying is, reading these two books will leave you wondering if Max Brooks knows something the rest of us don’t.
—
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
My sole exposure to this movie before cracking the book was the Muppets’ parody of its trailer, and a quirky news story about people calling Redbox to complain that the DVD was pirated because it’s printed to look like someone scribbled on it with Sharpie. Honestly, I thought it was going to be a kung fu epic. In any case, Peanut bought the Blu-ray and I told her I couldn’t watch it with her because I was honor-bound by an internet pledge. “That’s stupid and you’re stupid,” she said, but she dutiflly shelved the movie until I could read the book.
I’m really, really glad she did.
This novel captivated me in a way no novel has since… let me think, now. Probably Memoirs of a Geisha. Part murder mystery, part cyberpunk drama, part… I don’t know… financial war epic. The two main characters are extraordinary in that they are both very different from anyone you know, yet somehow very relatable. (Well, to me, at least.) I really, really loved reading a story where neither of the “good guys” possessed a smidge of our tiresome, boring, outdated “American values”. They are both atheists. They are both sexually promiscuous. They are both, in their own way, devoted to revealing harmful truths. They are both ruled by logic rather than emotion. These are characters who have identified their flaws, and are comfortable with them. I found that to be refreshing.
What really drew me in, though, was the novel’s tone. The story is consistently told in this very clinical style. Something like the opposite of “show, don’t tell”. As far as the book is concerned, its job is to simply describe what’s happening, full stop. It doesn’t indulge in metaphor or symbolism. If a character puts on black pants, the book says “So-and-so put on black pants.” If a character goes into a room and stays there for seven minutes, the books says “He stayed there for seven minutes.” The chapter titles are just the dates on which the action takes place. Dragon Tattoo is a long book with lots of fiddly little details, and the tone helps make it go down smooth. It wouldn’t work for every story, but it works for this one.
On a personal level, I really enjoyed seeing a complicated mystery coming together the way it did. I’ve been pondering the workings of a good mystery book ever since I stumbled my way through writing one for NaNoWriMo ’10, and I think Dragon Tattoo taught me a few things.
The movie was excellent too, of course. I knew Daniel Craig starred in it, but the whole time I read the book I imagined his character portrayed by Liam Neeson.
—
The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo
If you’ve ever taken a psych class, you know who Dr. Zimbardo is. He’s the man who designed and implemented the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of college students were divided into two groups of guards and prisoners to play-act a fake prison for two weeks. The experiment had to be cut short because of the extreme emotional stress the “prisoners” found themselves in, as the guards abused their power and things got way out of hand. The conclusions Zimbardo drew were that normal, everyday people can do atrocious things when put into extreme situations. He argues that, while we are always responsible for our actions, they are not always the product of purely internal factors. Our external situation can alter us as well, often without us even realizing it.
what the book does is compares the prison experiment to the real-world atrocities carried out at Abu Ghraib. The parallels are chilling. Zimbardo argues that the government’s explanation for the abuses there — having been the fault of just a few “bad apples” — is a short-sighted summary of the situation that borders on being a total miscarriage of justice.
Leaving the scientific and editorial aspects aside, the book was worth reading simply for being such a detailed analysis of these two events. From a historical standpoint, these are interesting tales that reveal something about our own culture and humanity. I do sort of wish the book had stopped there, though. Not being a psych major myself, the chapters and chapters of rote data analysis simply rolled off of me, and while I don’t disagree with Zimbardo’s findings and opinions I thought he came across as unnecessarily preachy during some of the overlong “this is what it all means” segments.
I get why the book is written the way it’s written. But I would have liked a more condensed version of the same material.
—
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
This was the second time I turned down Peanut’s movie invitation. This one worked a little better in my favor, though, because it not only kept me out of the theater but also got Peanut to actually read a book herself. (I wouldn’t classify what she usually uses her Kindle for as “books”. More like “senseless drivel”. But that’s a complaint for another time.)
A lot of people had told me this book was exceptional, and… I don’t think I agree with them. It was short, at least. I was able to consume it in a single night. The story and the characters were great. The premise is interesting in a blatantly horrific way. The book does a good job pulling your brain in and forcing you to examine yourself in the protagonist’s situation. It’s similar to zombie stories in that regard.
And the setting was pretty much perfect. The book is set in a nonspecific future sometime after the downfall of the USA. It walks that fine line between giving you just enough information that you have a good sense of the world and how things work there, but not so much that you’re overburdened with trivia. When a setting walks that line correctly you know the world well enough to absorb the story being told, but you don’t know everything so you’re always left wanting to learn more. This works especially well when the book is the first in a series, which The Hunger Games is.
It was the tone of the book that really got to me. It was just very, very… wrong. This story is about an enslaved country whose children are forced to draw lots to see who “wins” the opportunity to fight and kill each other in gladitorial bloodsport. It’s emotionally and psychologically terrifying, both from the standpoint of being a kid whose name gets drawn and from being a member of the community who has to stand by watching it happen, year after year.
However, the book is not written in a dark, gritty, “holy shit can you imagine” kind of way. It’s written like Harry Potter. Which, I will grant you, were great books! They were at their greatest, though, when they were lighthearted stories about young kids exploring a magical world of infinite fantasy and wonder. When the books veered off into darker territory they got really uncomfortable, and virtually no one liked those parts to the exclusion of the fantasy bits. And while you could argue that kids being in situations where they have to fight for their lives should make you feel uncomfortable, understand that I mean “awkward uncomfortable” and not “writhing in your chair uncomfortable”. Like the authors themselves were uncomfortable as they were writing out the words.
Without having seen the movie yet, I’ve decided Hunger Games probably works much better on the screen than as a book. That’s not an insult in the slightest; some storytellers simply have that quality. (Two prestigious examples being Neil Gaiman and Stephen King.) I still don’t want to go to the theater, but this will be a day one Blu-ray purchase. I’m sure Peanut will be happy that we’ll be able to watch our new movie right away for a change. And though she’ll never admit it, I think she’ll be happy to have read the book first, too.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire – (2001)
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is the fourth-worst movie in Disney’s Animated Classics series. Trawling around the internet, love for the film is hard to come by — and that’s when people even remember it at all. It is, in a lot of ways, the second coming of The Black Cauldron: it’s one of the few Disney films to earn a PG rating, it was fabulously ambitious and expensive to produce, neither critics nor audiences knew quite what to do with it. Atlantis had the added problem of steep competition from rival film studios, left to claw a place for itself next to Dreamworks’s Shrek. (Which, I will grudgingly admit, is the superior movie. )
Still, I believe it’s a great film, and I’d always hoped that after it got a few years under its belt people would go back with open minds and rediscover it. Isn’t that sort of what happens to Disney movies that get forgotten? Heck, even Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood weren’t well-appreciated in their own time. But ah, here we are a decade on, and it seems Atlantis gets the short end of that stick too. The world has moved on. Pixar is king of the hill, Dreamworks continues to crank out Shrek sequels, and even though Disney is getting back into the fairy tale business it’s all being done in CGI. There’s no reason for a new generation to look back on an archeological oddity like Atlantis.
The best I can hope for this article to do, then, is to maybe convince a few people who haven’t seen it to give it a try. Or, perhaps, to share a new perspective for people who saw it and didn’t like it. And so the very first thing I’m going to do is piss everybody off. That’s right, people; prepare to get mad at internets.
—
Nausicaa: Castle in the Blue Water
Here’s the blurb from my webpage, circa 2002, that introduced my Atlantis write-up:
Most webpages about this movie rant and complain about how it rips off some holy anime. Silly me, but mine actually describes why I like the film. Always thinking positive, that’s me!
Oh ho ho! Save some of that zingsauce for the rest of us, 20-year-old Brickroad!
2001 was right in the middle of that awkward angry phase most of us internet denizens go through (and many of us never grow out of). It was particularly awkward and angry for me because I liked playing video games but hated watching anime. This may come as a shock to you, but the Venn diagram of internet hang-outs for those two topics has a pretty large overlap. It was especially bad because I tended to only play JRPGs, which in the late PSX-era were basically anime stories with button inputs. My main haunt at the time happened to be an IRC channel and web forum dedicated to Suikoden. I had a lot of mean conversations with people who were (at best) trying to get me to watch whatever their new favorite anime was, in that good-natured way people do when they like something and want to share it. Or (at worst) picking on me  because anyone who doesn’t see the inherent brilliance of Rouroni Kenshin has a mental defect and therefore deserves scorn and mockery.
That… that last sentence was pretty, uh, 2001. Let’s see if I can’t dial it back a notch.
I like to think I gave as good as I got, and the truth is I would take some of those old bitch-fests to heart and discover some legitimately good anime in the next few years. In the meantime, though, I had Atlantis, and the dominate opinion from my most important social circles was that it was a worthless film which, depending on who you asked, was either Disney “trying to be anime” or “ripping off [insert anime here]“. Either way, it was a dumb movie and I was dumb for liking it.
Knowing now what I do about Atlantis‘s supposed anime influences, Hayao Miyazaki in particular, I’ve softened my defensive position against that argument somewhat. If you sit down to watch Atlantis, and you consider what the field of animation looked like in the eary aughts, the influences are quite obvious. However, I now know more about a lot of things I didn’t in 2001. I know a bit more about the artistic expression of ancient cultures, which were distilled and combined to give Atlantis its unusual look. I know a bit more about the art of worldbuilding, particularly creating false histories and languages, both of which provide Atlantis a deep, lived-in feel. I know a bit more about the works of Jules Verne, those classic stories about fantastic turn-of-the-century technologies and amazing hidden worlds, from which much of our modern fantasy and sci-fi draw inspiration.
I’ve also experienced Nausicaa, and Castle in the Sky, and (god help me) the entirety of Nadia. I say this with confidence: you simply can’t get from them the same nutrients you can from Atlantis. It’s not plagiarised material, as was often claimed back in the day. And it’s not simply the animated adaptation of classical literature, which would be par for Disney’s course. It is pieces from all over being put together to build something new. The mass market rejected it because it was neither a comedy nor a romance. The hostile anime kids rejected it because they identified superficial comparisons to other works they were already enjoying. What the mass market missed was a piece of technically brilliant animation and some highly entertaining character acting. What the niche market missed was a tale about a quaint American everyman, and a beautifully-constructed society founded on history and mythology. Atlantis has qualities neither Shrek nor Nadia possess; first and foremost, the city of Atlantis itself.
—
“My grandpa used to tell me stories about this place…”
It takes forty-three minutes from the time you push play to the time Princess Kida finally welcomes you to the city of Atlantis. The build-up is both necessary and worthwhile. It’s not enough to just bring us cold into a fantasy setting… not if your story is about outsiders going to that place for a visit. It’s why these stories have wardrobes and looking glasses.
Unassuming nobody Milo Thatch’s journey is a little more involved than stepping through a wardrobe. He starts out by banging his head against the walls of beaurocracy, a sensation with which we can all sympathize. Before long he’s whisked away into the world of Preston Whitmore, eccentric billionaire, and his cavalcade of of technical marvels bent on finding the lost continent. Next he boards the submarine Ulysses and meets the members of its crew, each quirkier than the last. And then it’s down into the depths of the ocean, into the murky unknown where Milo hopes to find the road to Atlantis. There the ship does battle with a gargantuan sea monster built by the ancient Atlanteans themselves.
Traveling to Atlantis with Milo is something like peeling back the layers of an onion. The audience already knows what’s at the center; Atlantis is right there on the movie poster and DVD box cover. So if it’s not a surprise, why spend forty-three minutes focusing on the journey? Because the getting-there matters. Atlantis is, after all, not a fantasy world. It’s a place on our very own world, a place which nobody has visited in thousands of years. The story takes place at a time when the last corners of the Earth were being explored, and those quests were radically difficult and dangerous. Getting to Atlantis? Considerably moreso. A difficult and harrowing journey is one of the tenets of the Vernian  adventure story.
When we finally get there, Atlantis is every bit as glorious and alien as we were expecting it to be. I wish I knew more about the process of designing this place on paper, because I bet it was fascinating. Imagine the challenge: Atlantis is a lost continent, but it was still a place on our planet that ostensibly existed alongside other ancient civilizations. It was mighty and powerful, and possessed technology the likes of which would not be seen again until modern times. Therefore, it cannot simply be a “new” place, some separate-but-equal analogue to the ancient Greeks or Egyptians. At the same time it cannot simply be a blend of ancient culture and mythology; that would give the impression that Atlantis came after those other cultures, or was somehow subservient to them.
Atlantis had to be new without being new, and different without being different.
The effect is impressive, if not 100% successful. It’s a bit too easy to pick out the cultural inflences that were drawn upon: the Atlantean warriors and their African tribal masks, the Mesoamerican architecture, an alphabet remniscient of Celtic runes. Still, the cohesion between these disparate elements is good enough that Atlantis lives and breathes like a real place. It has enough of its own identity to avoid looking anachronistic, but it’s close enough to our popular perceptions of the ancient world that we can imagine our civilization having evolved from it.
The two most striking physical traits of Atlantis are water and spirals. Much of Atlantean culture, even before the collapse, was influenced by its proximity to the ocean. Atlantean warriors use spears and nets, fishing villages cling to tiny islands strewn throughout its little sea. Ships are modeled to look like fish and other forms of aquatic life. A veil of mist hangs over the whole city, courtesy of the waters pouring into the molten rock below. Spirals and swirls are carved into the stone pillars and stairways, bringing to mind waves and ocean currents. And absolutely everywhere, the color blue. Not just the color of the crystal that provides the city with light and energy, but the color of the ocean that surrounds it as well.
(Quick personal aside: am I the only one who doesn’t associate blue with any of the great ancient cultures? In my head Greece is white marble, Egypt is yellow sand and brown pyramids, America is gold statues and rainforest green. Might this be why Atlantis is so blue?)
Disney has animated a lot of historical places over the years. Though painstaking accuracy was never the goal, there has always been enough detail for that the settings to really sell themselves. Just in the years leading up to Atlantis we were taken to breathtaking reconstructions of Paris, China, and the jungles of deepest Africa. When you saw those places, you knew someone had taken pride in getting it right. And that’s the note Atlantis hits. If Atlantis were a real place, and there were historical details to steep from and get right, this is what the Disney version of it would look like.
—
“Yahd lu goh nikh!“
And may I point out that Atlantis does indeed look awesome? If you want to see some amazing tech, look into how Disnyey’s Deep Canvas animation technique works. Without going into too much detail, this style allows animators to effectively paint a 3D world rather than a simple 2D backdrop, as seen in most traditional animated features. Disney had developed Deep Canvas a few years earlier, for Tarzan, where it was put to great effect showing speed and movement. In Atlantis it was used more to give a sense of scale and dimension. The final shot of the movie is a minute-long unbroken pullback of the entire city, filled with the gorgeous art of its buildings and waters, comprised of who knows how many layers of moving parts and effects. The director’s commentary boasts it as the most complicated shot in Disney history, and I just about believe it. As a man who appreciates fine animation, I’m saddened this shot isn’t every bit as recognizable as Lady and Tramp slurping spaghetti, or Rafiki holding Simba on Pride Rock.
 It’s not just the scenery that’s impressive. Gone are the days of 50-foot PlayStation hydras; when Atlantis‘s animators used CGI to create objects and effects, the result was much more impressive and well-hidden than before. The film’s two major battle scenes are climactic and terrifying, a step-and-a-half above anything you could possibly do with just a paintbrush. In the first, the Ulysses flees from the Atlantean Leviathan, an enormous mechanical lobster that defends Atlantis from intruders. The second is a spectacular dogfight between Atlantean fish-ships and WWI-era airplanes in an exploding volcanic shaft. The energy and sense of danger in these sequences is terrific, even in those few frames where the 3D effects clash with the 2D characters.
Atlantis was approached more as a live action movie than an animated one. The animators even went as far as to emulate camera movements, framing each scene in the way it might appear if they were filming instead of drawing. Nowadays we call this sort of illusion “shaky cam syndrome” and groan about its pervasiveness, but remember: we’re still in 2001 here. The technique hasn’t been hammered into our consciousness yet, and besides, it’s an animation effect, not someone for-real shaking a camera. These guys were creating the illusion of an illusion.
And though it’s not a musical, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Atlantis‘s musical score. In fact…
“Now Brick,” you say, “surely that’s an exaggeration. What about Beauty and the Beast? The Lion King?” Yes yes, both of which were musicals. That’s the difference, to me: the score of those films hangs overtop a skeleton of lyrics and vocalization. To have a musical piece really bring you into the world of a movie, to come to define that movie in your mind, is something Disney has been very good at since before any of us were born. Atlantis is no exception to this rule. It pulls it off without the benefit of lyrics. Not only that, but the soundtrack also incorporates sounds that are unmistakably Atlantean. This must have created all the same challenges as the design of the visuals or the language. What kinds of music would Atlanteans make? And how can that be incorporated into a story about the modern world catching up to it?
Back in the day, when we were jobless mopes with not much to do but lay around and watch the same movies over and over, we were hogging a friend’s PS2 while he slept in the next room. Apparently we had the volume up too loud, because he came in scolding us: “Are you guys watching Unbreakable again?” (Unbreakable being one of the movies we would watch over and over.) Well, no, we were watching Atlantis, but that led to a brief discussion about how the main themes of the two movies were similar. A brief IMDB search later revealed, yep, same guy: James Newton Howard. One of those rare Hollywood composers who can attach his music to a movie so well that the two become inseperable. Once you’ve seen Atlantis you will always know its theme music, because it will attach itself to your cerebral cortex without the assistance of snappy rhymes.
—
“Paper clips. Big ones.”
When you’re a jobless mope who sits around with his friends watching the same movies over and over, you tend to look for different qualities than most normal people do. I mean, you still like plot and characters and cool effects, but the real jackpot lies in a movie that is endlessly quotable. Back in the day my gaming group was capable of holding entire conversations consisting of nothing but lines from Clerks and Boondock Saints. I think the reason Atlantis made it into our DVD rotation, when no other Disney film did, was because its script is chock full of grade-A dynamite movie quote gold.
 While the main characters of the film are rounded and somewhat bland, the supporting cast is quirky and charming and, well, fun. None of them are realistic, but then, that’s the point. What kind of people are going to be on the front line of a mission that plunges towards the bottom of the sea and into the Earth’s crust? Why, people whose personalities are larger than life. A man who sees the face of god in explosions. A squat little creature who is sexually attracted to dirt. An old lady so jaded and cynical that she would rather burst into flames than crack a smile. Here are just a few choice samples that stayed in our lexicon for a number of years:
“I got yer four basic food groups: beans, bacon, whiskey and lard!”
“Watch me make Rhode Island dance.”
“This here’s a good place not to be.”
Hmm… come to think of it, those are all Cookie’s quotes. Well, he didn’t get all the good lines.
Aside from quotability, though, what you want in a supporting cast is a bunch of characters who can actually carry the weight of the plot. Something it can rest on, see, while the heroes and villains are steering it around. The crew of the Ulysses is more than happy to oblige in this regard. They stay in the background until needed, step forward for gags and background exposition only to the degree which is necessary, and each put just the right spin on their featured scenes.
There’s a layer of characterization here unique to Atlantis, too. All of these characters have to be capable of a double-cross. They’re mercenaries, and as a result they have to clash with Milo when he realizes their leader, Commander Rourke, doesn’t have Atlantis’s best interests at heart. The characters have to be introduced in a way that makes you like them, even though you know they’re only in it for the money. That way, when they pull their guns and blast the door down, you’re every bit as betrayed as Milo is, without feeling like the characters are acting out of turn. Of course they don’t stay bad — otherwise the emotional investment from earlier in the movie would have no payoff. So they have to switch back in a way that is equally believable. The movie creates this inner conflict between wealth and morality for six separate characters.
They’re not worse lovable animal pals from traditional Disney flicks, but they are very different. This is another spot where Atlantis takes its cues from live action rather than animation. The background cast aren’t cute and lovable; they’re the types of people who would be played by Steve Buscemi and J.K. Simmons. They help give Atlantis a more grown-up flavor than if, say, Milo had a monkey assistant and Kida could talk to dolphins.
—
“A thousand years ago you would have slain them on sight.”
Disney gets about two-point-eight billion reasons a year to disagree with me on this, but I think the whole Disney Princess franchise is a mistake. What they do is, they make this masterpiece of a film with a wonderful, memorable female lead… then they stick her in a dress and make her sing vapid songs about birthdays and tea parties in order to sell backpacks and plastic fairy wands. Yeah yeah, I realize that’s just how the business works, and that merchandising is a huge part of every major movie release. It’s just, at some point, you’re damaging your own characters beyond what I consider acceptable.
Kida alone was spared the torment of this soulless zombie existence. It’s not that I want her starring in a fanciful activity book about stringing Christmas lights, it just seems like once you’ve established there’s no line you won’t cross to wring another nickel out of your beloved characters you might as well jam in as many as will fit. Maybe it has something to do with that scene where Kida kicks a man in the balls, pulls a knife on a second man, then kicks him in the balls just for good measure. Hmm… but then, Mulan killed a whole army by blowing up a mountain, and she’s right there at the tea party.  So maybe violence isn’t the answer.
Well, Atlantis is due for a Blu-ray release this summer. Maybe they’ll follow it up with a “How to Speak Atlantean” Sing-a-long video starring Kida in a ballgown. Perhaps a duet with Ariel? Our Friend the Leviathan? This… this probably isn’t worth thinking about to the degree that I have done so.
—
It took a lot of work, but I managed to at least pry the hinges off that angry metal box I had built for myself in 2001, where I drew bright red lines around the things I like and flung cowpies at anyone on the other side of them. I have fighting games and first person shooters on my game shelf, for crying out loud. And anime on my movie shelf. That I bought! With my own money! Because I wanted it!
Mostly, though, I hope Atlantis isn’t forgotten because I want another Disney film like it, someday. One that’s a little more grown-up, a little less song-and-dance-y, with slightly more complex characters and situations. And I want it drawn by hand, please, if that’s okay. I feel a bit like Disney looked back at The Black Cauldron and said, “Okay, we messed that up, but I’m sure we’ll get it right this time,” and then didn’t. I don’t want the next guys to look back at Atlantis and give up before they even start.
And on the off chance there are still people out there who are angry at this movie for being too much like Castle in the Sky, I say this: I own a copy of Castle in the Sky, and it is a wonderful movie in lots of ways Atlantis isn’t. But you may assuage your fears. The two DVDs do not come out of their boxes and fight when your back is turned. Watching Atlantis won’t cause you to like Castle less. And, perhaps best of all, nobody gets into heated “subs vs. dubs” debates about Disney films. I mean, that’s gotta be worth something.
By the way, this is just a cartoons blog now. I don’t read or play video games anymore. I gave all my systems to orphans and now I just watch cartoons all day, forever.
Having just shotgunned the entire back half of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the past week, I was entirely prepared to come here to the ol’ blog and give a detailed analysis of the most impressive aspect of that show: Prince Zuko’s character arc. I had the post half-outlined, even, bits and baubles tucked away in a .txt file from the first two seasons of the show, talking not only about why Zuko was a stellar character in and of himself, but also how amazed I was someone had signed off on his inclusion in what is ostensibly a children’s program. I felt that by digging into Zuko I could really get to the heart of why Avatar was so tremendous, and that it would be a better way to attack the post than by simply doing a huge-ass review.
But I’m not going to do that anymore, because in the past few days I’ve gotten myself up to speed on The Legend of Korra, and I have a much better way to attack the post now. The Last Airbender was some truly excellent writing, start to finish, and Korra has given every indication of continuing that trend. So instead of making Zuko my poster boy, I’m going to simply take it head-on and share three observations that will explain why I feel this writing is so strong, and why I’m so glad to have it as part of my weekly cartoon rotation.
—
Respect
Generally speaking, both Avatar series have a healthy level of respect for their audience. This is really a combination of two different things. For one, the writers trust the audience enough to understand the story and the motivations of characters without explicitly spelling everything out for them. And for another, the writers trust themselves enough to keep a firm hand on the fanservice faucet.
As to the first thing, the thing about respecting the audience’s intelligence, I do think it’s fair to hold children’s programming to a certain standard. A lot of people don’t, dismissing it with “It’s a kid’s show, what do you expect,” but that’s just wrong. Kids are smart. They can learn things. In a sense, learning things is all kids know how to do. Obviously you’re not going to get away with intricate subplots of the wheels-within-wheels variety, but that’s no reason to make nuance and subtlety completely verboten. Consider Iroh’s scenes in The Tales of Ba Sing Se. Early on, as he is shopping for some odds and ends, he cheers an upset child by singing about a brave little soldier boy. Later, he sings this same song in memory of his dead son. He has been shopping all day for the ingredients of a little shrine, clearly a ritual he has undergone before, to commemorate a sad event in his life. He doesn’t explain to anyone he passes on the street, “Today is the anniversary of my son’s death,” or even “Your boy reminds me of my own son.” The audience is allowed to fill in the blanks, because there is only one way the blanks can go.
It’s not just kid’s shows that get this wrong. It’s the difference between The Wire and CSI: Wherever. There are shows at every age level that aims at what the writers suspect must be the lowest common denominator. In my opinion, the bad ones tend to aim much too low. Maybe it’s a result of those grown-ups having their expectations molded by cartoons which assumed they were dummies, back when they were kids.
The other respect issue is fanservice, and this is one of the big reason I can’t watch serial anime. At some point of the development process the writers begin getting feedback about what their audience thinks they want to see, and then either 1) gives it to them or 2) teases them with it. The problem is that the audience usually doesn’t know exactly what they want to see. We lack the scope and imagination to understand what the show is capable of doing, and packing it into tiny boxes like “Toph x Sokka 4EVER” is counterproductive to giving us a well-realized story. It can lead to character elements that don’t make any sense, or to the show simply not inventing anything new because the fans are always clamoring for more of the stuff that’s already old.
My favorite example of anti-fanservice so far happened within the first few minutes of the first episode of Korra. A young child runs up to the sole remaining character from the first series and asks her about the one lingering mystery that series ended without solving. “It’s a remarkable story,” she’s told — but then she’s immediately interrupted by a second child who begins machinegunning stupid, banal questions instead. The mystery is left unsolved. This was a very strong message. “Yes, that story is interesting,” the writers are telling us, “and we will get to it eventually. But now’s not the time. We have this new character and this new world to show you first. Don’t worry so much about everything that came before; our new story is just as good.”
That kind of storytelling takes respect and courage.
—
Worldbuilding
This one is really a no-brainer, and is a key aspect of pretty much all fantasy fiction. The world of Avatar is a mystical place which gives the likes of Westeros and Middle-earth a run for their money. It’s very clear that this is a place which was well-defined geographically, politically, culturally and spiritually before the first episode was even written. Somewhere at Nickelodeon HQ is a filing cabinet full of information about Avatar that will never make it into the show proper, but rather will just be used to color the story as appropriate.
It blew my mind when I realized the huge lake and double-circle-thingy that I’d been staring at on the map during the intro in every episode turned out to be a huge geographical feature and an enormous city, respectively. The map was there in the first few seconds of the program. Serpent’s Pass and Ba Sing Se weren’t relevant until well into the second season.
The Last Airbender focused a lot on Aang developing his superpowers, which led to a lot of what the elements meant culturally as well as practically. However, the story was set in a time where the air culture had long been wiped out, and Aang himself had no more use for airbending instruction. And so while water, earth and fire were all explained to us during his lessons, air remained at least a little bit of a mystery.
That came to an end during the second episode of The Legend of Korra. Korra is the exact opposite of Aang; she has already mastered (or, at least, has a natural aptitude for and has received competent instruction in) three of the four elements, but simply cannot grok the concepts behind air. Enter her airbending teacher, Tenzin, who for the first time in sixty episodes gives us some very basic explanations behind the art. What you realize, as you watch Tenzin’s children whirling between the spinning gates, is that these concepts have been within the very heart of the series all along. Korra is, after all, just learning things that came natural to Aang.
I’m willing to bet, before the series was even pitched to the network, someone sat down and delineated what each of the four elements would represent in this world, what their cultures would look like, what their practitioners would be able to do. Then, after laying that overtop the plot graph for The Last Airbender, they realized that while this airbending stuff is important, there’s no realistic place to really put a fine point on it. No reason to have someone sit us down and say, “Okay, this is what airbending is and why it works.” The information was there, it just wasn’t spelled out until it became necessary to do so, at the beginning of the second series. Now that the second series is here, we can look back and say, “Oh, yeah, that all makes sense. It all fits.” This gives the viewer the sense of a world that persists whether they are watching it or not.
Because the world of The Last Airbender was such a vibrant and well-realized place, I not only know that Korra‘s more focused setting has a firm foundation, but also that it will continue to grow in a believable way.
—
Structure
This is the big one, though. The really, really big one. The Last Airbender had an ending. A for-real ending that was for-real planned by for-real writers who for-real knew where they were going. It was a completed story, and you can tell it was built that way from the very beginning. Each season (or “book”) had a self-contained plot, and each episode (or “chapter”) advanced that plot. There was very little filler, and what was there was used for pacing rather than padding. The writers were never in this limbo where they had to just keep the story spinning its wheels until they saw whether or not their next season would be picked up.
In a series like Avatar, I really really need this kind of structure. I need some assurance that, if I watch fifty episodes of your TV show, I will not have wasted my time. I need to know you’re going somewhere. This is why I very rarely begin watching a series that hasn’t already run its course. Yes, I know now that Lost had a worthwhile structure that told an incredible story spanning six years’ worth of episodes. But how could I have possibly known that the night the pilot premiered?
The Last Airbender had just such a structure, though. The individual episodes were worth watching, but so too was the entire series worth watching. Absorbing the journey is fine, but I’m really more of a destination guy. What this says about Korra, though, is that the writers have their direction, know where their end point is, and have the chops to get us there. I know I can put my money on the table here and get something for it.
—
Of course, there are lots of reasons to like Korra outside of its storytelling muscle. For instance, you can dress up just about anything in jazz music and fedoras and make it instantly appealing to me. But that’s a superficial kind of fandom, and Korra deserves more than that.
I should also point out that a good TV show doesn’t need these three elements in order to work well. My other favorite currently-airing cartoon possesses none of them to a particularly enviable degree. But then, Korra wants a larger investment from me than other cartoons do. Because of what its older brother accomplished, I’m happy to pay it. I think it’s going to be a great ride.
Today’s post was going to be about The Legend of Korra, but then I found this thing amidst some old text files. I have no recollection of writing this, but apparently I did, at some point in July of 2009. I was unemployed at the time so maybe it’s the blacked-out backlash against abject desperation? Who knows.
Anyway it’s kind of funny, so I’ll share it with you. Also just the idea of parodying one of Weird Al’s song is amusing in and of itself, which makes it kind of meta-funny.
I Remember Kefka
a parody of I Remember Larry by Weird Al Yankovic
Say do you remember that guy from the Empire
Who dressed up like he was some kind of clown
The one who mind-controlled me
Then erased all of my memories
And made me set fires all over town
What about when he spiked Doma’s water supply
Killed the wife and the kid of that old samurai
Have you heard his maniacal laugh
What a hideous sound
Son of a submariner
What a crazy guy
I’ll never forget about Kefka
Not til the day I die
Say do you recall when we went down to Thamasa
And Kefka followed us in pursuit
Then he murdered all those Espers
Drained the magic from their corpses
And then killed Gen’ral Leo to boot
The way that he prances is so immature
But we know that he hates hates hates hates us for sure
I admit those tantrums he throws
I think that they’re kind of cute
Son of a submariner
What a crazy guy
I’ll never forget about Kefka
Not til the day I die
You knew that when you heard him laugh
You could kiss your sorry butt good-bye
Remember when he cut the world in half
And knocked our airship out of the sky
Say do you remember dropping into Kef’s tower
With an Off’ring and a sword in each hand
We smashed all of his statues
And defeated all his monsters
In hopes of making our final stand
He declared us to sound just like a self-help book
But one single attack was all that it took
To put Kefka down for good
And bring peace back to the land
Oh, son of a submariner
What a crazy guy
I’ll never forget about Kefka
Not til the day I die
Oh, son of a submariner
What a crazy guy
I’ll never forget about Kefka
Not til the day I die
Not til the day I die
Oh, I remember Kefka
Oh, I remember Kefka
If you’re a horrible unwashed cretin who doesn’t appreciate Weird Al and have therefore never heard the original, educate yourself, fool!
The Little Mermaid – (1989)
The Little Mermaid is my favorite Disney movie. I don’t mean to say it’s the most technically impressive; that would doubtlessly be The Lion King. Nor do I mean it’s the most fun to watch; it’s hard to beat Lilo & Stitch. It’s not the funniest (The Emperor’s New Groove), or the most thrilling (Atlantis), or even the best love story (Beauty and the Beast). But it is my favorite, because I have an emotional connection to it that I haven’t developed with any other movie. Not “any other Disney movie”, you understand; any movie period.
It’s not nostalgia — not exactly. If you want nostalgia, you’ve got to talk to Aladdin, Short Circuit II and Labyrinth. No, it’s something a lot deeper than just fond memories, although my memories of the movie are quite fond. Put most simply, The Little Mermaid is the movie that taught me how to love movies. I mean, I’ve known since I was a kid that I did love movies, but this was the one that made me realize why.
This story is going to be quite long. To get to the heart of what I mean, I’m going to have to take you back to the summer of 1994.
—
“The last mermaid is in captivity…”
Nintendo released this game in 1994 called Super Metroid. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It was pretty good. I mean, I liked it. But I didn’t have a copy myself, nor even a Super Nintendo to play it on, so I didn’t actually replay it for years and years. We’re talking after high school graduation here; 2001 or so. When I did discover it again, the game jostled my brain so hard that I wanted to analyze every single pixel of it. I knew that I loved the game, but I really wanted to get to the heart of why. It was the first game I really sat down and tried to deconstruct, to analzye critically, and through that process I started developing a keen eye not just for what games are good, but why those games are good.
So the summer of ’01 was a pretty fun and exciting time. I found it especially exciting because I’d already gone through this sort of thing once before, in 1994, with The Little Mermaid. I knew the benefits of defining why games were good would be far-reaching and long-lasting, and enable me to enjoy them on a much stronger level than before.
In ’94 I lived in a tiny duplex with my mother, brother and stepfather. Summetime saw an end to bedtimes, and even at that age I was naturally nocturnal, so I often had the whole apartment to myself after the lightweights went to sleep. I had to keep the volume down, which meant lots of playing Final Fantasy and Mega Man on mute, but it also meant I did a lot of reading. And buried somewhere way in the back of our hall closet was, for some reason, a book full of fairy tales. It consisted of a rather impressive collection of works by Aesop, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.
I had already seen The Little Mermaid in theaters, of course. I was quite young in 1989, and was at exactly the age to really be enthralled by cartoons. My brother and I gobbled up The Land Before Time and especially All Dogs Go To Heaven, so The Little Mermaid was a natural fit for us. But five years is a long time for a child, so by 1994 I had largely forgotten about it. It was just some fun movie I saw a long time ago.
 For some reason, reading Andersen’s original text made me want to revisit the movie. Obviously none of the fairy tales in my little book were anything like Disney’s retellings; I found them to be deliciously violent, deeply religious and endlessly fascinating. Believe it or not, The Little Sea-maid (as it was translated in my book) is one of the most religious and most violent. In it, the witch doesn’t merely vacuum the princess’s voice up into a magical glowing seashell; she simply takes a knife and hacks out her tongue. The princess is forced to subject herself to torture and self-mutilation, as it is described in great detail that walking and dancing cut her feet apart “as though with sharp knives”. Most shockingly, the stakes involved in her contract with the witch were much higher; failure meant she would die and dissolve into foam… but success meant she would share the prince’s immortal soul in Paradise — a little perk naturally denied to the sea-people.
What most people realize upon reading these classic fairy tales is just how much scrubbing Walt Disney had to do to get something inoffensive and cheerful. What I realized, though, was how much these differences changed the narrative. It wasn’t just the details that had been changed, but the characters’ goals and motivations. Andersen’s short story wasn’t one of unrequited love, but of the chance for religious redemption. It didn’t have a villain, or a big climactic battle scene. Nothing you could attach a musical number to. The princess is a lonely, wretched creature almost from start to finish. Most of all, the ending was depressing. I understood the broad strokes of the changes Disney had made, but the details were long gone from my memory. I resolved to sit down and watch the movie with the book in my lap, contrasting the two stories and really try and understand what made them both good in their own ways.
Unfortunately for me, in 1994 it was absoultely impossible to get your hands on a copy of The Little Mermaid. Some jacknapes had drawn a phallus on the cover of the VHS release and so it had been pulled from store shelves. Nobody I knew owned a copy. Disney wasn’t like to air it on TV. Rental stores all came up bust. I saw it a few times in secondhand stores, but never for less than a hundred dollars, which, my goodness, might as well have been a mountain of gold for a twelve-year-old living in a duplex.
This denial turned into an obsession. I can’t remember another movie or game or book or TV show I’ve been so obsessed with before or since in my entire life. Many of those summer nights in ’94 were spent writing, and two of the stories I completed were a modern-day retelling of the Andersen original and a full script for a Disney sequel, complete with songs. (The genesis of a long and storied fanfiction career, in retrospect.) A third project, started during the school year and intended to be a script for an RPG inspired by Final Fantasy II, included a long underwater section complete with a mermaid priestess joining the hero’s party. Looking back, I’m actually a little proud that I was able to channel my frustration into something that constructive. (Copies of these projects no longer exist, by the way. I’m sure they would make for interesting reading.)
I did have one major release valve: the summer of ’94 was the theatrical release of The Lion King. And while $100 for a VHS copy of The Little Mermaid was far beyond my grasp, collecting and recycling enough aluminum cans to afford a movie ticket certainly was not. The Lion King was the first movie I saw in theaters twice, three times, and four times. I saw in it a lot of the same qualities I imagined The Little Mermaid must possess, and I was determined to find out exactly why the movie was so special. I can remember reading newspaper reviews and videotaping voice actor interviews when they appeared on Jay Leno. (I still remember Nathan Lane insisting Timon and Pumbaa were gay.) And while I was too young to really get to the heart of the matter, it did help me to start watching all my movies a little more critically. Much of this newfound critiquing ability was aimed at my brother’s VHS copy of Aladdin, and especially at other cartoons of the day, such as Animaniacs. I filled an entire VHS tape with the Warner brothers (and sister). I made painstaking lists of episodes I liked, episodes I didn’t, what changes I would make and most importantly, why. Things like, “the rhymes in this song are stupid” or “they missed a chance for a really funny joke here” or “Buttons and Mindy are stupid and boring and I hate them”.
Life moved on, but I never stopped yearning for The Little Mermaid. At one point Disney released a few compliation CDs with all its classic music; in this way I became re-acquainted with the sublime Part of Your World. My father got an internet connection, and I managed to find the script and a whole flurry of screenshots and artwork at the humble request of his Amiga’s 14.4 dial-up modem. I couldn’t watch the movie, but I could experience it, at least in bits and pieces. For a long time that was enough.
The movie was re-issued in 1998, but it wasn’t playing in any of the theaters in my town. Oddly enough, nobody wanted to drive a high school sophomore into Tampa to see a kid’s movie. A VHS re-release inevitably followed, though, and I swear it got watched every single night for a solid year. The four-year wait, if anything, had only sweetened my reception of it. And that’s why it’s my favorite.
tl;dr: In my personal experience, The Little Mermaid was the Super Metroid of film. In its weird way, it made me want to appreciate movies, not simply watch them.
—
“Spineless, savage harpooning fish-eaters!”
Now that the personal sappy stuff is out of the way, I can get back to the heart of what this blog series is about: looking at The Little Mermaid as just a slice of the entire Disney body of animation. This is worth discussing in some detail, because it’s probably the second biggest slice, right behind Snow White. What you have to realize is, financially and critically speaking, Disney’s animation studio had been in something of a… well… a slump pretty much since Cinderella. The 60s, 70s and 80s were not particularly kind to the studio, which had long since abandoned its fairy tale formula in favor of literary adaptations and adventure stories. Heck, many of them weren’t even musicals. Looked at from that angle, The Little Mermaid was a return to form and the unexpected herald for Disney’s second golden age.
 However, it is not similar in make or build to Disney’s earliest fairy tales, and I think that was very much by design. It was infused with a lot of the bits and pieces of the various failures and experiments Disney had tinkered with along the way. Most notably, while it is the story of a beautiful princess and a dashing prince, the decision was made to flesh these characters out as real people rather than just plot tokens. In particular, I think the human characters are always understated when people look back at this movie.
If it’s 1989, and you’re making a Disney movie, and someone decides it’s going to be another fairy tale like Snow White and Cinderella, hopefully the first thing that enters your head is “How do I do this without entering the realm of self-parody?” After fifty years of percolating, for example, the character of Prince Charming is so ingrained into popular culture that it is impossible to separate anything useful out of him. This new story is definitely going to have a Prince Charming — it can’t very well not — but people have come to expect something a little more engaging than “she falls in love with him because he is a prince, and then he heroically saves her life, and they live happily ever after.”
The very first scene in The Little Mermaid introduces us to Prince Eric. The idea here is that Eric is intended to be a complete and well-realized personality right from the beginning. Whatever else happens, this Prince Charming isn’t going to simply show up on a white horse in time to slay the villain and rescue the girl. Right away a conflict is established between Eric, an adventurous free spirit, and his dour manservant Grimsby. Eric is intrigued by sea chanties about merpeople, which Grimsby dismisses as “nautical nonsense”. Before the opening credits even hit the screen, we’re already invested in this guy, what he wants, and at least one obstacle standing in his way.
Eric’s second scene occurs during his birthday party, where we learn he is a hopeless romantic. He’s enthralled by the idea of being in love, though he has never experienced it and can’t really define it. This is an openness and immaturity the movie has already established in Ariel a few scenes prior, and so we learn that the hero and heroine have something very important in common. When they eventually do fall in love, we know it’s not going to be because someday my prince will come, or whatever, but because they are two people who are similar on a very basic level.
Grimsby is important in this equation for two reasons. First, Eric needs a foil to bounce his youthful optimism off of. We need someone to constantly tell Eric that his fantasies of true love are unrealistic, so as to better sweeten the payoff when he turns out to be wrong. And second, we need someone who can carry the burden of physical comedy so the dashing young hero doesn’t have to; someone to turn green with seasickness, or get a faceful of ash, to lighten what otherwise would simply be unbroken exposition.
Eric and Grimsby, and later characters like Carlotta the kind-hearted maid and Louis the eccentric French chef, paint this delightful picture of the human world being a friendly place populated with truly great people. These characters are not without their foibles, but they are mostly presented as being generous, caring people who are worth knowing and living with. This is extremely important to the story, because such large parts of it hinge on Ariel’s longing to go there. For this aspect of the story to work, everything Ariel’s father tells her about the human world needs to be wrong. Thanks to Eric and Grimsby being established so early on, we’re assured it will be.
—
Part of Those Worlds
Two different worlds colliding in an unusual way is a very common theme in Disney movies. What they can’t seem to agree on, though, is whether people from two separate worlds should be able to live in harmony despite their differences; Aladdin and Tarzan tell it one way, but Atlantis and Fox and the Hound tell it quite another. The Little Mermaid sort of splits the difference by making the boundaries between the two worlds uncrossable; you can’t combine them, you have to choose. Right away we are shown that Ariel and Eric share a longing for the other’s world, as though there is already some invisible connection between them.
The Little Mermaid does this two worlds duality thing better than a lot of Disney flicks. That’s not really the interesting topic here, though. The question worth asking is, why is this particular theme so popular in the first place? I think it’s used a sort of shorthand for showing us spectacular things. A movie will show us one world, a place to set up a sort of mental base camp, and then it’ll twist its hand and show us the other, a fantastic new place which it then draws its energy from. The heroes come from our world, but they go to this new one, and there they have a thrilling adventure.
What The Little Mermaid does, though, is casts the human world as the alien one, as the unobtainable “other”. It is meant to be strange an unfamiliar to us; as strange as Tarzan’s jungle or Kida’s dead underground civilization. This gives the movie a unique opportunity to introduce us to our own world as a new and wonderful place. The most magical scenes in the movie aren’t the underwater locales, but Ariel’s tour of Eric’s idyllic human kingdom. Dancing crabs and glowing golden tridents are passé, but puppetry? Horses? These things are fascinating because Ariel is fascinated by them. It’s the same trick Lady and the Tramp pulled off by naming its human characters Darling and Jim Dear.
 This sense of wonder wasn’t accidental. Intense, insatiable curiosity is probably Ariel’s most defining character trait; she falls in love with the world of humans long before she lays eyes on Eric himself. But the point doesn’t come across unless we feel that sense of curiosity as well. Her song, Part of Your World, has her singing about the wonder of pots and corkscrews as though they were priceless treasure. More than anything, she wants to ask questions about how the human world works — questions we, as humans, should be able to answer. Can we, though? Can you really articulate what fire is, and why it burns, to someone who expects the answer to be simple?
Lady once asked, “What is a baby, anyway?” And that made us wonder, too.
We don’t really think about things this way unless they’re reflected directly back at us, and that’s how The Little Mermaid makes the human world of pipes and forks come alive with wonder. Wonder, and not conflict, is the end goal of the two worlds duality in this film. The undersea kingdom is very pointedly not described in terms that would make us wonder about it; we’re not shown enough of its construction, or infrastructure, or day-to-day operation to stop and think about what a marvelous place it is. That would steal thunder from Eric’s kingdom up above, which would have been a real shame.
—
“…the importance of body language! Hah!”
Showing us something wonderful is meaningless without also showing us a character’s reaction, though. In this department The Little Mermaid faces a difficult challenge: by the time she gets to this new world, Ariel has already sold her voice to the sea witch. She’s only able to communicate with the other characters (and with us) via facial expression.
In Andersen’s original story the princess’s inability to speak wasn’t much of a hinderence to her due to her uncommonly expressive “speaking eyes”. Ariel enjoys much the same effect by being so good at conveying emotion. In fact, Ariel is probably the single most expressive Disney character ever drawn at the time her movie came out.
I think you young’un types, with your fancy CGI and your colorful vector ponies and whatnot, may not realize how difficult it was to animate a face back in the day. We’re talking about the late ’80s here, people. Most of the free world was just now starting to shake off three horrendous decades of budget Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The technique was out there, as anyone with affection for Chuck Jones could tell you, but often not the will. Hell, just this week I saw The Great Mouse Detective for the first time. A mere three years older than The Little Mermaid, but when it comes to facial expression and body language it might as well have come from a different planet. My point is, someone made the conscious decision to double down on Ariel, and god bless them for it.
Ariel is not a subtle character. Her smiles and frowns are enormous; her cringes and winces are infectious. During the second half of the film you really can tell what she’s thinking and saying simply by reading her face. And so, for the most part, can Eric… oblivious numbskull that he is. Because her reaction shots are always cranked up to eleven, she’s always casting a bright spotlight on whatever she’s interacting with. She beams when she sees a fork sitting on the dining room table, and we are for a moment as excited as she is. Then, just as quickly, she realizes she looks stupid for brushing her hair with it and we feel a sting of embarrassment for her. When her antics bring amusement to Eric’s face, though, she brightens back up, and we brighten with her. There’s that sense of wonderment.
It isn’t just communication, though. Ariel actively manipulates Eric throughout their scenes together. Initially, when he finds her on the beach, she attempts to tell him her story using pantomime. When that gets her nowhere she gives him these big, somber eyes and a pained frown, thereby playing on his pity. We-the-viewer know its a ruse because she gives her animal sidekicks a wide grin immediately afterwards, but Eric is none the wiser. It’s almost a shame Sebastian whispered her name to him during Kiss the Girl — I bet he could have gotten it within ten guesses just based on her reactions.
This level of emotion, being so vividly on display, elicits a rare level of attachment. The way she’s drawn, it’s very easy to become absorbed into Ariel’s personality. It’s impossible to mistake her infatuation as Eric dances aboard his ship, her disbelief in herself for contemplating Flotsam and Jetsam’s suggestion to see Ursula, her disgust as the sea witch slithers in and out of her personal space. You can’t not be on her side throughout the entire story. Is it any wonder Disney began taking all its characters in this direction?
—
“And then this seagull came, and he was all…”
A few years ago some mope named MC Chris did this reasonably hilarious rant about Kingdom Hearts II, wherein he vocalizes his frustration at the game’s actual lack of fun Disney stuff to do by saying, “I didn’t see so much as a Sebastian the crab for like a hundred millenia.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that he happened to equate “fun Disney stuff” with “Sebastian the crab.”
The earliest Disney princesses had some supernatural ability to make small critters fall in love with them and do their bidding. This is another spot where Ariel differs somewhat; her animals sidekicks aren’t smitten indentured servants. Rather, they’re real characters who not only have unique personalities but also play very strong roles in advancing the plot.
 Now, before you start in with the, “Don’t all Disney movies have those?” Yes. Yes they do. But where The Little Mermaid differs from most other films is, on the personality front, the rest of the pack usually stops somewhere just short of “vaguely obnoxious”. And on the plot front, well… sad to say, the plot often simply forgets they exist. Look, I love Cri-Kee and Pascal and Pegasus as much as the next guy, but would those stories really have gone anywhere different if they hadn’t been drawn? No? Then what was the point of having them, except to sell plushies and coloring books?
Flounder, Scuttle and especially Sebastian are different. Ariel needs them all, and what’s more, she needs them all for different reasons. Flounder is her partner in crime whose job is mostly to get her into trouble. Scuttle is her sole connection to the human world, a font of dubious expertise on her shipwrecked treasures. Sebastian is at once her unwitting protector, her voice of reason, and her moral support. The main reason these characters work so well together is they don’t get in each other’s way. Think about it: a crab, a fish and a seagull. In any given scene, Ariel is either underwater or on land. Which means she can, at most, be hassled by two of her animal friends at once. Thus the writers were free to use more discretion when it came to picking which one gets the spotlight in which scene. This flows quite a bit better than the standard practice of a Disney hero simply amassing sidekicks as she goes along. (Be honest — did you even remember Mulan’s horse had a name?)
It wouldn’t be fair to say one never overshadows another, though, because Sebastian overshadows them both. This tiny little Jamaican crab pull double duty as Baloo and Jiminey Cricket, sings two of the movie’s songs and counts for the bulk of its physical comedy. He does, however, know which scenes are his, and never steals them directly from Ariel when it’s inappropriate. This takes a very delicate touch, to know when to get out of the protagonist’s way. It’s like, when you think of Aladdin, you don’t really think of Aladdin, do you? Of course not.
There is one scene, just before the movie’s climax, where Ariel’s friends really have to pull together for her. Scuttle has just delivered some bad news about how the villain has appeared and is essentially going to ruin everyone’s everything. Ariel responds exactly as you’d imagine a Disney heroine would: steadfast resolve followed by immediate action. “Action” in this case involves diving into the ocean to swim after Eric’s ship, where she immediately discovers she doesn’t know how to swim with these two big lanky bone-tubes coming out the back of her. Sebastian fixes the situation by sending her a barrel to grab on to and by delegating tasks to Flounder and Scuttle in order to save the day: Flounder swims Ariel to the ship, Scuttle acts as the advance guard to delay the witch, and Sebastian flees home to summon the sea king’s help. These actions play well to each of the sidekicks’ personalities and abilities: Flounder is helpful and can swim, Scuttle is annoying and can fly, Sebastian is a notorious tattle-tale. Ariel is the helpless observer in this scene, at least until she’s able to confront Ursula directly. It all pulls together really well when contrasted with, say, Aladdin’s fortuitous discovery of a flying carpet.
When it comes time to stop the show, though? Sebastian is more than happy to oblige.
—
A Hot Crustacean Band
Is there a more instantly recognizable Disney song than Under the Sea? And I mean recognizable in a good, fond way. Not in a “If I hear that goddamn Pocahontas song one more time…” way.
There are four major songs in The Little Mermaid and a smattering of minor ones, and they are all perfect. Part of Your World has to be the most complete distillation of a cartoon character into music that I’ve ever seen. Most Disney heroes have to share their introductory song with plot setup or visual gags, but Ariel gets that time all to herself. This proves to be important, since Ariel’s beautiful singing voice is such a key element to the plot. Very few Disney songs feature a single character singing uninterrupted for an entire scene… in fact, I can’t think of another time where that happens until Mulan’s Reflection, and it wasn’t pulled off nearly as well.
For obvious reasons, Part of Your World‘s message about longing for impossible things struck a chord with me during those years where I had the soundtrack but not the movie.
Then there’s Under the Sea which… well, let’s put it this way. Before Alan Menken composed the soundtrack for The Little Mermaid, Disney had three Oscar wins for Best Song. After Under the Sea won in 1989, he went on to win three more for the next three films he composed. Elton John and Phil Collins won two more on top of that. It would almost be worth going to school and getting a musical education just to be able to have the words to describe what a genius Alan Menken is, not just for his own compositions, but for how thoroughly he inspired others to follow in his footsteps.
(And I’m sorry, but he should have won his fifth for I See the Light.)
 I haven’t talked about Ursula much yet, and that’s because it’s difficult to divorce her from Poor Unfortunate Souls. Ursula is a liar and a bully, and that’s exactly what this song is about. The first half she tells lies about who she is and what she does, and the second half she spends browbeating Ariel into selling her soul. This is largely a storytelling song, and it pauses just long enough for Ursula to clearly outline the details of her plan and what, exactly, she expects Ariel to agree to. In a way, Ursula has stolen Ariel’s voice even before she arrives; she hardly lets the poor mermaid get a word in edgewise as she’s singing up her credentials.
The Disney villain song is often difficult to get right, because they usually are storytelling songs. They have to convey information about the villain’s schemes in addition to putting just the right amount of evil on display. Too much of the former and you end up with something like Friends On the Other Side, which is just a conversation set to music. Too much of the latter and you end up with Hellfire, which is almost inappropriately over the top. Twice, by my reckoning, has it been struck just right. Poor Unfortunate Souls was one. (Deducing the other is left as an exercise to my readers.)
Which just leaves Kiss the Girl, which is a wonderful combination of Sebastian’s show-stopping lyricism and Ariel’s manipulative experessions, both of which I’ve already talked about at great length. What more can be said?
—
I tried to go back and count how many paragraphs this entry turned out to be, but they haven’t invented numbers that high yet. But hey, at least that means I was able to fit in lots of screenshots. However long you’re thinking this took me to write, you can triple your estimate; I took two breaks in the middle to re-watch the movie. I think that was a good decision.
I don’t think everyone loves media as much as I do. I mean, most people watch TV and movies and play games and things, but most people don’t generally find themselves as actively engaged as I do. There’s a word for such people: normal. I kid, I kid. Really, I think it’s just a side effect of being a nerd. Chances are, if you’ve read this whole post, you’ve got at least a bit of nerd in yourself, too. And I think most nerds have that one magical thing in their nerd career, that one show or game or book that really defines how they look at all their other shows or games or books. For most of you over thirty it’s probably Star Wars. For most of you under twenty it’s probably Harry Potter. I don’t have an estimate for how many nerds ended up with the Little Mermaid card. But god damn, I sure did.
It’s not a bad card, though. It has led me on some strange journeys over the years, into some interesting chat rooms, and some interesting arguments, and interesting conversations with unimaginative cashiers. (“The Little Mermaid soundtrack? You want a gift receipt?”) Eventually, it led me to an awkward comparison to Super Metroid, and that’s how I’m going to leave this post.
A year or so ago I got myself into a rather heated discussion about Samus Aran’s characterization. Namely, whether or not she had any. One of my dudes answered the call by posting an image from Super Metroid’s prologue, that great shot of Samus’s focused eyes behind her green visor, and he said, “That’s your characterization right there.” And I was like, buddy, you know exactly what you’re talking about. Except it wasn’t Samus that taught me how to look for characterization in that way — it was Ariel, many years earlier. And so she will always be my favorite.
Man, I can think of two things Marquis Elmdore can suck — and they’re both in my scrotum. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Chapter Three immediately caused me to revise my previous opinion re: “Chemists are broken, man.” Within the first few fights it was more like, “Oh my dear god what have I gotten myself into?” Interspersed, of course, with broken sobs. Actually, it wasn’t so much difficult as it was a series of puzzles. Until now all my Chemist upgrades had pretty much just come straight at me; the next town had better gear, or better potions, or whatever. But those days were behind me now. The Cartoon Brigade had mastered the job and new upgrades were not forthcoming. They would have to be more proactive in carving advantages for themselves.
The chapter opens up on a laughable fight against some joes where Orran features as a guest character. Orran is a superhero who spams an infinite-range attack spell that deals no damage but adds Stop, Disable and Immobilize. The narrative here is that Orran is being picked on and you have to swoop in to his rescue, but with tricks like that in his arsenal he would probably be able to go head-to-head with anything in the game.
The gloves come off in the fight against Grand Inquisitor What’s-his-name. The goal here is to kill the leader, who is a white mage that loves to constantly refill his health. He has a hard time retreating out of range because Chemists with guns have a range of 8 squares, but the battle still gave me a lot of trouble because eliminating his support proved impossible. Just as I got one of the enemy units low on health, the priest guy would step forward and heal them. What’s worse, he had a passive skill that enabled him to regenerate MP each round. It was like fighting some kind of infinite healing battery.
After pounding my head against it for a while, I realized the solution was obvious: instead of eliminating the support units, I had to concentrate fire on the leader. This was dangerous because the rest of the enemeis would have a field day coming in at my flanks, and because missing a volley of shots would enable the Inqusitor to refill his HP and MP. Until now I had made sure to eliminate every unit in every battle, probably because I had a mental block in place that made me believe eliminating the leader was a degenerate tactic. It was something I relied on way too much back when the game was new — before I really understood how to play it — but I hadn’t done it at all during my first PSP replay, and I was quite proud of that.
But that’s what challenge runs are for: they force you to eliminate those pesky mental blocks and focus on learning the game for real. Rules is rules, yeah? If the game says “Defeat This Guy”, that’s what you do. And this fight made me realize that’s exactly what my Chemists would have to do, too.
The next wall was in the Orbonne Monestary. The first fight was against a trio of Dragoons backed up by a Chemist and two Time Mages. This was the first fight in the game I had to do any scumming. If any of the support rolled White Magic as their second skill, they would be able to keep the Dragoons alive indefinitely. And the Dragoons could one-shot my Chemists. And they took like six shots to kill as it was. This was frustrating for a long time. After maybe a dozen tries I realized that there was simply no way to get ahead in the damage game; their output trumped mine three times over, and they were being Hasted besides. This was a game-ending fight. But people had completed this challenge before, so what was I doing wrong?
I knew that shops in FFT upgraded their wares periodically, but I had never understood the mechanism that controlled this. Additionally, these fights in the monestary were the first ones that took place in old territory; I was no longer following a daisy chain of new towns with new shops to check. What I needed to do was take a break and look for new equipment in the hopes that someone would have new guns for sale. Of course the first place I checked was the Clockwork City, and of course the guy there had Mythril Guns for me. This was a severe boost to everyone’s damage output, and was exactly what I needed to get a leg up. I was also able to get everyone a Green Beret, which offered +1 Speed. So my Chemists were faster and dealing more damage per shot. Ye gods, I should have gone shopping before that Inquisitor fight.
The Dragoon fight was still no pushover, but the new gear made a world of difference. The next fight against Isilud went fine, and I was even able to clear the map. And after that was a coin flip fight against Wiegraf, where half the time he will step backwards through a doorway to a place you can’t reach him (and the fight takes forever because you’re immediately mobbed by mages while he gets healed), and half the time he steps forward directly into your fire. I wasted no time taking the freebie and feeding the knucklehead six bullets. I considered it payback for giving me so much trouble on the Windflats.
Next a couple of new guests joined me. I robbed Luso of some gear before dismissing him, beefing McGinnis’s stats slightly. That ended up not mattering because the next town had better stuff anyway. Then came Rapha with her infuriating flashbomb magic. Rapha is all about dice. She uses these attacks which target random squares, and hit a random number of times. Sometimes she’ll nail a unit four times in a single turn, racking up huge damage and putting a big smile on your face. And sometimes you just watch seven or eight totally ineffective attack animations while she wastes her turn in the stupidest way imaginable. We’ll come back to Rapha and her inadequacies in a moment.
Riovanes Castle is the most notorious map in Final Fantasy Tactics. It contains four battles, three of which would make anyone’s list of Hardest Battles in the Game. First you have to clear a small army away from the castle gate; easily-enough accomplished if you have guns and a ton of healing potions. No sweat.
Next, McGinnis has to solo Wiegraf. This is the fight that caused ten thousand ragequits. An unsuspecting player who hasn’t been cycling through his save slots (and remember, this game originally premiered on the PSX, which involved using memory cards with very limited space) who saves his game after clearing the easy fight can find himself in a totally unwinnable battle against Wiegraf. The only way to win this fight is through preparation, but if you’re locked down to one game save there’s no time to go back and prepare. Whoops.
I knew the fight was coming, of course, so I had a safe save outside of Riovanes. I didn’t do any preparation, though, because I couldn’t think of anything to do. Wiegraf punished me severely for my ineptitude. Getting ahead in the damage was impossible because Auto-Potion wasn’t enough to cover the 150+ damage he was whacking me with every round. There wasn’t even any range advantage, because his Move and Speed were both so great. The solution ended up being selling off all my Potions and Hi-Potions. This way, when Auto-Potion triggered, it would use an X-Potion instead and restore 150 HP, instead of 30. This not only made the fight winnable, but impossible to lose. Every round Auto-Potion triggered I was able to shoot Wiegraf instead of healing, and he wasn’t able to take much of that.
So begins the third fight, where Wiegraf transforms into Belias and both parties call in their reinforcements. Belias’s reinforcements are a pack of demons who, like Belias himself, can one-shot poor, hapless Chemists who don’t line up on the Zodiac compatibility. This battle was brutal, but I was able to stay on top of things. The Chemists who didn’t die from a single attack were highly durable thanks to Auto-X-Potions. Plus, the demons themselves were not very durable; a couple shots each and I was able to take them out. Aside from that it was just a matter of making sure no two Chemists were within four squares of each other; far enough away that Belias couldn’t squeeze them both into one of this summon spells, but close enough that I could step in with a quick Phoenix Down when required.
It was a satisfying fight.
And then Marquis Elmdore.
Fuck Marquis Elmdore.
If you’ve played FFT you already know why this fight is awful. I’m going to describe it in detail anyway.
First, you have to sit through a long cutscene. A loooooong cutscene. If I were using these posts to analyze FFT’s narrative, it would probably rate as one of my favorite scenes in the game. (Finally a practical hero who understands he shouldn’t trade superpowered magic stones to monstrous villains in exchange for a single human life! Cecil could learn something from McGinnis.) But man, I had to reload the game so many times that I began to hate every line of this scene. It was more like, okay, just hammer the X button while I’m reading a webpage or something, and then check back in four minutes and maybe I can start entering commands.
Second, the goal of the battle is “protect Rapha”. Rapha, as previously stated, is, while powerful, extremely inconsistent. Much of the time her only action will consist of “step forward, summon nine sparklies that do nothing, then get hit and die”. And if that happens, you get a game over.
Third, Elmdore is fast and has two ninja sidekicks. These ninjas both have debilitating attacks that can Stop or KO at a 100% hit rate. Or they can simply stomp someone to death with their dual-wielded ninja swords. All three opponents get an action before any of the heroes do, which means it is entirely possible for Rapha to be dead before you even do anything.
Fourth, while McGinnis starts right up in the thick of things, the other party members all begin the fight down in a little niche alongside the main arena. Even with Germinas Boots (+1 Move/+1 Jump) they have to spend a whole turn just getting upstairs. Since McGinnis will probably be dead by the time they get there, this means two full rounds of enemy actions before you can do much of anything.
Fifth, because Rapha’s brother Marach counts as a guest for this fight (even though he is unconscious and never makes any moves) you don’t get your full five-man party. So one of my Chemists had to be benched.
The canonical way to win the fight is to make Ramza a Ninja and use his innate speed boost to (hopefully) take out one of the targets before they get Rapha.
The way to win with a Chemist party is to leave two open spots down in your starting crevice, pray to god that Rapha moves there on her turn, pray to another god that one of Elmdore’s bitches follows her onto the second square, then open fire with three Chemists. That should get the job done.
It took about two hours of constantly failing, reloading, and sitting through that goddamn cutscene to finally get that shining moment to come through for me.
Friends, countrymen… let us join hands in our hatred for this bullshit random-ass luck-driven fight.
One chapter left. With any luck the absolute worst of it is behind me. To be honest, I don’t know how much worse I could stand it to get before giving up. In any case, thank you for reading.
Hercules – (1997)
Before we talk about Hercules, can we talk about how terrible this video cover is? I don’t know if this is what was on the original VHS release or just something they whipped together for the re-issue, but my goodness is it awful. For one, if you’re going to make your gigantic muscular hero the focal point of the image, maybe don’t cover up the hero’s muscles with a smaller image of that same hero riding his flying horse with all his friends. Second, if you absolutely must have the ensemble cast there in the shot, maybe find room to squeeze the villain in somewhere? Especially when the movie happens to feature one of the most amusing and visually striking villains in the Disney canon? Just a thought, guys. And, oh yeah, just because you decided to put the hero’s face on the box twice doesn’t mean you have to draw him looking like a dippy tard.
 A durr. Enough about the box. If Disney movies have taught me anything, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. And inside this stupid ugly box is a pretty good cartoon.
—
The Gospel Truth
In 1997, I was all geared up to hate this movie.
Believe it or not, there was a brief period during my teenage years where I tried to supress my interest in Disney movies. Aladdin and The Lion King were okay; they were released when I was of an age where all my friends still liked kids’ movies. And besides, they were both big manly stories with swordplay and adventure and ferocious animals and absolutely kick-ass Sega Genesis games. You were pushing your luck if you copped to liking Beauty and the Beast, but otherwise it was clear sailing.
But then Disney released Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, neither of which looked very exciting. Neither my brother nor any of my friends wanted to see them, even though I secretly did, so I let the issue drop and eventually convinced myself I’d grown out of Disney movies along with everyone else. When the previews for Hercules started airing — promising to be a high-action adventure story along the lines of Aladdin — I actively saught reasons to dislike it.
It wasn’t hard to find my angle. A chilhood obsession with fairy tales had matured into a dabbling in world mythologies, of which the Greek pantheon was my favorite. I already knew a little something about Hercules… like, for example, that his name wasn’t Hercules. That was the Roman name for the character, whose proper name was Heracles. So Disney had gotten his name wrong, and that was one strike against. And then they went and cast Hades as the villain which, ugh! How pedestrian. I knew quite well that the Greek gods were much more complicated than to simply be able to lump them into “good” and “evil” groups — Hades wasn’t supposed to be a “bad guy” any more than Zeus was supposed to be a “good guy”. Clearly this fool movie had been thrown together by people who had no idea what the hell they were doing. It was beneath me. I felt quite smug in my dismissal of it.
It would be another couple years before someone explained to me the concept of “artistic license”.
The very next year, coinciding with the VHS re-release of The Little Mermaid, I decided I didn’t care anymore who knew I was into cartoons. Good timing, too; just in time to catch Mulan and Tarzan. Sometime after those movies hit DVD I eventually went back and made my peaced with Hercules. Though I still had a hard time choking down some of the inaccuracies (The ancient Greeks know who Cleopatra is? Hera is Hercules’s mother?) I was delighted at just how many sly references they managed to get right. In particular, I was impressed to see Nessus mentioned by name. I grinned at Scar’s cameo as the Nemean lion. And “Someone dial I-X-I-I!” remains one of my favorite Disney gags.
 Most of all, though, I loved Hades. What I first thought would be the movie’s most glaring flaw became the thing I liked most about it.
—
“We dance, we kiss, we shmooze, we go home. Whaddaya say?”
Disney villains are supposed to be scary. Not, like, nightmare scary, you understand. But scary enough that they pose a convincing threat to the hero and provide a strong enough presence that the audience has someone to root against. Looked at from this perspective Hades had some big shoes to fill, coming in along the coattails of the ambitiously cunning Scar and the dark-hearted Frollo.
Instead, they go a bit of a different direction, and make Hades a funny villain. This isn’t new ground either, when you consider the cowardly Prince John or foppish Gaston. The difference is that Hades is a comedian, rather than an oaf. He’s not clumsy, or stupid, or bumbling. Rather, he cuts apart all his scenes with a razor-like sarcasm. He talks fast, he cracks wise, he plays with words. Being a god, Hades is immortal, untouchable and immutable. And so his threat and presence come from a different sort of place entirely: a twisted sense of humor that works on a different wavelength from the rest of the cast.
The film establishes the strength of Hades’s comedic timing early on by showing us how bad the rest of the cast is at it. While shmoozing with the rest of the gods just after Hercules is born, Zeus dismisses Hades’s complaints about being stuck in the Underworld by quipping, “You’ll work yourself to death.” Realizing he has inadvertantly cracked a joke (because Hades is the god of death roflmao), Zeus collapses into his chair with thunderous laughter, and the rest of the gods join in. Everyone but Hades, that is. Because, see, Zeus’s joke isn’t funny, and Hades alone knows that. It’s lame, B-rate material even for a kiddie movie, and the over-the-top reaction to it gets is totally inappropriate. It’s a lampshade, a huge neon sign buzzing, “These aren’t the jokes, people.”
This persists through the rest of the movie. Funny things happen to the rest of the cast, as Herc and his companions find themselves in silly situations. Phil the satyr, in particular, is the butt of more than his fair share of physical comedy. But Hades gets all the good material. It’s not the kind of humor you laugh at, of course. But you smile appreciatively. It’s clever and snappy, more how he says things than the things he says. A good approximation might be to think of Aladdin‘s Genie, if he were the bad guy
The other half of Hades’s personality is anger. Every Disney villain is prone to outbursts of violent rage, but Hades is particularly good at it because of his unique visual quirk: fiery blue hair. Hades’s hair is every bit as expressive as his face and voice. It flares up brightly when he gets mad, simmers down and smooths back as he cools down again. Disney has always been good at breathing life into inanimate objects, but the fireball on Hades’s head is the only instance I can recall of that sort of detail being paid to one aspect of an actual character. And, bringing things around full circle, Hades’s propensity to give off light and heat is put to good effect for some cute visual gags, touching back on his humorous core. As far as Disney villains go, Hades is definitely one of the good ones.
—
One Last Hopeless
I wish the same could be said for the movie’s comic relief, to wit: Hades’s bumbling gremlin sidekicks Pain and Panic, and Herc’s satyr buddy Phil. Let us first observe that, if any Disney flick had no use for comic relief, certainly it’s Hercules. I mean, the movie is strong on visual comedy and has Hades picking up most of the rest of the slack. That could have been enough, but no, Disney movies are contractually obligated to have some number of annoying hangers-on to pad out the exposition and pull commercial sound bytes from.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes these characters are put to great use. Ariel and Aladdin have no shortage of animal buddies following them around, but a point is generally made to put each one to good use somewhere on the plot graph. You could argue, for example, that Scuttle ends up saving the day in The Little Mermaid. Not bad for braindead seagull.
That sort of consideration isn’t paid in Hercules, unfortunately. The gremlins are almost obtrusively bad, right from their ham-fisted introduction. Panic is a nervous tittering wreck, and Pain gets himself stabbed in the butt twice within thirty seconds of showing his face. Oh, oh, because those are their names! Get it? Get it? It’s like Zeus’s non-joke from the previous scene, except this time it’s played perfectly straight. Every one of their scenes is like that; flat, embarrassing, and lifeless.
 Pain and Panic were not put in this movie because they have a role to play or a part to fulfill. They were put there because there was a market-tested checklist of character archetypes that worked in the last four Disney movies, and so this next one had to have them too. And while we’re at it, can we get Bobcat Goldthwait to do one of the voices? Pretty please? Maybe the gremlins wouldn’t stick out so sorely if Hades’s control over the film’s heroine Meg weren’t already a key plot point. She makes a much better minion by any metric you care to use. If Hades really does need some groveling, nonspecific underlings, I wish they had gone a bit more Flotsam-and-Jetsam and a bit less Iago-on-steroids.
Phil was a bigger disappointment, though, chiefly because you can’t have a movie without him. Herc needs a buddy, someone to learn from, to disappoint, and to eventually reconcile with. It’s a shame, because (botched musical number aside) Danny DeVito makes for an excellent sidekick. Phil is exactly the sort of jaded, world-weary voice of experience needed to temper Herc’s naivety and recklessness. It should have worked, but it didn’t, because the character ends up being so damn inconsistent.
Let me see if I can explore that a bit. Hercules shows up on Phil’s island (or whatever) looking for a hero trainer. Phil initially rebuffs Hercules quite forcefully, but then immediately shifts gears and invites Herc inside so he can give him a tour of all the former failed heroes he has trained. There’s something to be said for a gruff or aggressive character having a softer side, but Phil’s soft side isn’t exposed gradually or in response to anything Herc says or does. One minute it’s “scram, kid!” and the next it’s “come inside, I want to show you something”.
Later in the movie that same abrupt, pointless shift happens in reverse. Phil has to tell Herc that Meg has betrayed him, and tries to do it lightly because he knows it will break the poor big lug’s heart. Herc, of course, doesn’t want to hear the news, and reacts in exactly the way Phil has anticipated: denial and anger. You would think this is where Phil gives the kid some space to let it all sink in, but nope! Instead, Phil storms off, declaring Hercules to be a hopeless chump. This is an important distinction, here: Hercules doesn’t throw Phil out, Phil gives up and leaves voluntarily. Isn’t he supposed to be the mature one, here?
Finally, sad to say, it doesn’t help at all that Phil gets the movie’s worst song. One Last Hope isn’t just the low point in Hercules‘s soundtrack, but probably one of the most un-listenable songs in any Disney feature. The rhymes are forced, the song doesn’t scan at all, and though I’ve watched the film twice through this week I’ll be buggered sideways if I can find the melody in it. It constantly sounds like Danny DeVito wanted to talk his way through the lyrics rather than sing them, which puts a damper on Phil’s character as well as what should have been a really charming montage sequence. It ain’t Hakuna Matata, is my point. Now there were some goofy sidekicks who could pull their weight.
—
I Won’t Say (I’m in Love (With This Song))
Fortunately, One Last Hope isn’t representative of the soundtrack as a whole. The first thing to happen onscreen is the Greek Muses are re-cast as a black gospel quintet, which is such an obviously brilliant decision it almost wouldn’t have made sense not to do it. I typically find Disney choruses to be extremely dull (part of why I have a rough time watching the oldest Disney films), but the Muses immediately steal the show and inject some vibrance into the plot before the movie even gets started. The whole soundtrack has a soulful flavor to it that I think is unique amongst its peers.
Every Disney film with a romantic subplot has a love song, and Hercules is no exception. Hercules has the best one, though. My fondness for I Won’t Say borders on the irrational. I have a weakness for showtunes (part of why I love Disney films), and the quickest way to twang that weakness is to stir in some shoo-be-doo-wop. Which the Muses do. In spades. I also love the strong and somewhat clever lyricism; aside from the questionable opening line the whole song is formed with catchy phrases and half-rhymes, giving it a smooth and listenable flow. I don’t think I’ve ever skipped I Won’t Say when it’s popped up on the playlist. Best of all, while Meg and the Muses manage to stay out of each other’s way while they switch off from solo to harmony. You can tell what they’re saying. That’s often a rare duck in the great tapestry of Disney music.
It definitely doesn’t hurt that Susan Egan comes packing one of the sexiest singing voices in animation. Most Disney damsels can’t rightly get away with sexy.
 The canonical Disney romance song has the hero and heroine falling dopily in love with each other, either while singing a duet or while being serenaded by some combination of their sidekicks and the chorus. (Beauty and the Beast has it both ways!) They have to sometimes tweak the characters’ noses a bit to make this work, especially in the case of a duet, because let’s face it: not every character archetype lends itself well to a saccharine love sequence. Hercules himself is such a character; he’s far too honest and direct to gradually unravel his feelings over the course of two verses and a refrain. Having him sing half of the song would have felt forced, and so would have showing him silently reacting to an offscreen chorus. Indeed, once Herc knows what his feelings for Meg are, he comes right out and tells her. There’s no grace or nuance to it, it’s right there in the open, just like the rest of his personality.
It wouldn’t have worked for Meg, either. Remember, she’s not your average wistful and demure Disney princess; she is mocking and sardonic, constantly teasing, sometimes unpleasant. She is very purposely the kind of person it’s difficult to get close to. Meg is expected to spend much of her screen time keeping pace with Hades, after all. If they had simply shown her melting into Herc’s arms, we wouldn’t have believed it.
And yet the checklist must be served, so the puzzle of the romance song was solved with I Won’t Say. Hercules has already declared his undying love and been whisked off the scene, leaving Meg to stew with her conflicting feelings. The song isn’t about falling in love — that’s already happened. It’s about Meg’s reluctance to admit it to herself, having been burned so badly by this game before. The boring offscreen chorus has already been usurped by the Muses, who pull double-duty in this song by acting as Meg’s subconscious. (Which is sort of what what Muses do, in Greek mythology. That subtlety really pleased the pedant in me when I first watched the film, years ago.)
Put more succinctly: usually the characters are made to serve these romance sequences. In Hercules, the sequence serves the characters instead. It’s a better fit.
—
Attack of the 50-Foot CGI Monstrosity
You know what’s not a great fit? Slapping CGI monsters into a traditionally-animated feature. The 90s were an awesome time for high-quality Disney movies, but it was kind of a weird limbo as far as animation styles were concerned. Most animation was done at least partially by computer in those days, and it was still a strange balancing act trying to find how much was appropriate, and how to properly cover up the bits that weren’t.
Let me run the timeline by you here. You had Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, both of which had some cutting-edge CGI sequences which, while visually stunning, clashed terribly with the rest of the film. The smart bit of these sequences is that they were used to facilitate movement within the environment, so as to create dynamic skewing and rotation effects that would be impossible by hand. After that I didn’t watch Disney movies for a few years. Then I watched Mulan and Tarzan, both of which hid their use of CGI far more deftly. I felt those two films had perfected the craft.
So when I went back and watched Hercules, I was shocked by two things. First, by how much better the CGI had gotten in just the short time between Hercules and Mulan. And second, by the sheer chutzpah involved in using computer graphics to render a huge multi-headed dragon. Hell’s bells, just look at this thing:
I’m sorry, but that’s not a Disney monster, that’s the end boss to a PlayStation game. That thing couldn’t be more out of place if a cross-fade and a Latin chorus had accompanied it onto the screen. As far as I know, this hydra is the only anomaly of its kind. No other movie’s use of CGI is quite this… I don’t know… sore thumb.
It’s baffling, too, because the climactic fight sequence against all the gigantic monsters at the end of the movie looks so much better. Were the Titans rendered, as well? Because if so, the animators did a much better job making them fit in with the rest of the characters and scenery.
—
Was Hercules a weird spot to kick off this little Disney-a-thon? I don’t know. I think it might be a good average of the entire series as a whole. It’s a little obscure, certainly not a bombastic fan favorite, and yet it’s perfectly enjoyable if you ever sit down to actually watch it. Not just that, but there are spots where it really excels, really makes you stand up and take notice. Yes, it’s the product of a giant movie factory that spits out a new flavor every single year, and it’s easy to get lost in the deluge. It tries to spread its wings even as it keeps its feet firmly on the ground, and you can’t help but notice the spots where the analogy-bird stretches itself too thin as a result. But you watch it and remember that, despite their shortcomings, each of these movies still has a touch of magic in it. And really, that’s more than you could ask.
You and me, Herc, we’re on good terms now. I don’t mind so much anymore those losers got your name wrong.
|
|
