Word: disneyized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...matinees offered dessert before dinner, a nifty Hollywood cartoon or three before the feature film. Daffy Duck would fume, but gracefully, through some dethpickable humiliation. Droopy dog would corral a wolf felon by employing the emotional minimalism of a Buster Keaton on Quaaludes. Maybe there'd be an early Disney cartoon for more refined preteen appetites. And then, on with the main attraction! The feature was often a broken-down B-minus monster movie, and pretty much an aesthetic anticlimax after the seven-minute masterpieces that opened the show. At the time, of course, nobody figured to hang cartoons...
...this elaborate new blend of animation and live action co-produced by Disney and Steven Spielberg, the "cartoon before the movie" is how the movie begins. As you settle into your seat, the Maroon cartoon studio logo flares onto the screen, announcing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, starring Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit. For a few minutes of inventive mayhem, the infant crawls toward every lethal kitchen appliance while his harried hare of a baby-sitter works frantically to keep things from blowing up. It's the comedy of anticipated disaster -- the nightmare anxiety that propelled so many of Avery...
Roger Rabbit careers like a Toontown trolley and boasts a technical dexterity that Walt Disney could only have daydreamed of. At first you may snap to suspicious attention when, say, a cartoon stork pedals a real bicycle, or Jessica diddles a human's necktie. But the film encourages you to vacation in its ingenuity. Drop by the Ink and Paint Club, Toontown's toniest dive, where the password is "Walt sent me," penguin waiters patrol in tuxedos, and Daffy and Donald Duck, together for the first time, perform a piano duet. Meet old friends like Mickey and Bugs, Tweety...
...cost about a zillion simoleons (well, $35 million) and carries a humongous 739 names on the credits (not including Kathleen Turner, who lends her voice to Jessica). Something got lost in the move from storyboard to screen, and in the stretch from seven minutes to 103. From sad experience, Disney and Spielberg should know the perils of paying huge homage to modest genres, yet Roger Rabbit has the odor of a Toontown Tron, a 1941 for 1988. Zemeckis deserves credit for his will and wit, but he must have been handcuffed by the size of both the film...
High Concept is the no-fault insurance of the entertainment business, a brief description that both sells and sums up a movie or TV show. So leave it to the folks at Disney, the Everest of High Concept, to produce a movie based on this line: "Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin as twin twins." All twists and splits of the story proceed from this inspiration; the concept propels the plot. After a merging of those stars and that theme, everything else is just homework...