Word: cartoons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These days, nearly every popular movie wants to be a cartoon. For proof, check out 1989's five top hits: Batman; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Lethal Weapon 2; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Ghostbusters II. They all aspire to the freedom of form and story that any animated film takes for granted. Problem is, real life gets in the way. Location shooting is at the whim of weather; special effects can look chintzy onscreen. And actors! They cost the moon, and their bodies aren't elastic enough to perform the comic contortions that Daffy Duck can give...
Disney and Don Bluth can lead the way. Walt Disney, after all, created the genre, turning barnyard animals into superstars and a Sunday-supplement curiosity into the movie's most enduring subspecies. Bluth, a Disney renegade, showed his old masters that the cartoon possessed a social vitality for the '80s. Bluth's The Secret of NIMH was a parable on animal experimentation; An American Tail found much to say, endearingly, about melting-pot prejudice; The Land Before Time found love and death among the dinosaurs. Now Disney and Bluth have launched a welcome new Thanksgiving tradition, each producing a feature...
...Dogs Go to Heaven, Bluth takes a vacation from portent and dips into anecdote. Listen for familiar echoes (Little Miss Marker, Heaven Can Wait, even Disney's 1988 cartoon Oliver & Company) in the story of Charlie, a German shepherd who is reprieved from death and befriends a little girl kidnaped by his scurvy old gang. Visually, the picture is swathed in Bluth's trademark golden browns and moody blues. Aurally, it's a reunion of the Burt Pack: Burt Reynolds is the voice of Charlie, Loni Anderson is the moll Flo, the exuberantly flustered Dom DeLuise is Charlie...
...occasional nervous flutter of his hands, has a thriving career as a book editor and a cozy home life with a physician. They amount to a before-and-after picture of homosexuals in the age of liberation. The campy one, very '50s, is witty but a self-denigrating cartoon; his friend, very '80s, acts relaxed even when disclosing that his relationship is turning into an "open" one. The twist in Terrence McNally's midnight-dark comedy, which opened off-Broadway last week, is that the seemingly enviable, self- possessed character lacks the emotional resources to deal with the breakup...
There is a Bible for every taste, or lack thereof: Bibles bound in denim and hand-tooled leather, translations in street slang, Bible comic books, Bible cartoon videos and seventy times seven other gimmicky editions. Now, for the parson who has everything, here comes the ultimate in modern packaging: the Electronic Bible. This is not a new translation but a hand-held computer containing the entire scriptural text in either the King James or the Revised Standard Version. The item, manufactured by New Jersey-based Franklin Computer, will go on sale in selected retail outlets next week. Price...