Word: disneyized
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...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...
...Little Mermaid wrestles with no such ambiguities. It comes with flourishes, a rainbow and a perfect kiss -- full heartstring accompaniment. But from the first frame, Disney's suave storytellers cue you to wonderment in their adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Ariel is a mermaid princess with a teenager's yen to travel beyond her world and become part of the forbidden one above. To her father, King Triton of the Mer-people, humans are "spineless, savage, harpooning fish eaters." To Ariel they are skyrockets and sea chanteys and buried treasure -- the thrilling unknown. Then she spies hunky...
...Cricket, fussing avuncularly over Ariel but bound to break into calypso croon. Louis the French chef (Rene Auberjonois) brings sadistic elan to his dicing, flaying and serving of les poissons. Ursula (Pat Carroll) the sea witch is a fat, shimmying squid with malefic revenge in mind -- the sort of Disney horror queen who has given kids nightmares for a half-century. All these characters are given witty, hummable pop songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (the Little Shop of Horrors team), a reminder that the Hollywood cartoon has become the last, best refuge of the Broadway musical...
Thanksgiving starts the glut of year-end films: an all-star Steel Magnolias, a ponderous Valmont, a shaggy-dog story and one certified stunner, Disney's fairy-tale cartoon The Little Mermaid...