Water Disappointment: MOANA 2

There’s a telling line about two-thirds of the way into Disney’s Moana 2 in which the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) tells our disheartened heroine (Auli’i Cravalho) that he understands her pain. He sighs and says “No one likes sucking at their job.” Ugh. Such prosaic, contemporary crassness is all you need to know about a sequel that studiously replaces everything magical, warm, and clever about its predecessor with empty, cold, and slapdash effort all around. Where the first had soaring melodies and life-and-death pathos, this one has wet flatulent jokes and ghostly wisecracks and endless repetition of small-scale stakes. So dispiriting. I also wondered, half jokingly, if that line was a secret cry for help from within the writing and animating ranks of the project. Maybe they, too, could see this was a pretty terrible piece of work all around and were trying to send up a flare to let us know that, yes, we’ll think they’re sucking at their job. Simply put: this is not a movie a healthy animation studio would release to theaters. That this hastily reconfigured straight-to-streaming mini-series has fallen into multiplexes as an awkward movie-shaped thing is clearly a panic decision. (I wish it’d stayed a TV show; then I wouldn’t have seen it.) After last year’s flop 100th anniversary princess musical Wish was a critical and commercial whiff, it’s clear the studio wanted something theoretically safer, more guaranteed to win back some attention and money this year. Instead, the resulting feature made me think that, for as half-baked as Wish was, at least it was trying something with its hand-drawn/CG blend and unusual (if undercooked) plotting. Moana 2 is a new low for Disney animation. It tries nearly nothing at all and thinks we’ll eat it up anyway.

It follows up the moving and amusing original 2016 effort’s well-plotted, deeply-felt hero’s journey with catchy songs—the usual Disney mode!—by giving us exactly none of the original’s charms. Its music—without the melodies or lyrics of a Lin-Manuel Miranda or equivalent—are generic poppy nothings. Forget a lack of memorable melodies; this one doesn’t even have one memorable note. Its characters have no interesting inner journeys. Even the actual journey is a flat, predictable, one-thing-after-another trip with little at stake. Moana has to find a mythical island. Then she does. Along the way she meets some new obstacles and new characters—a crew of sailing pals, a semi-villainous demi-goddess, a few wiggly monsters—and not a single one pops with delight or interest. (One’s even a grumpy old guy who keeps complaining about the story he’s in, annoyed by the unmemorable singing, awful clunky rapping, and flat attempts at comedy. I related to him the most.) Some supporting characters just fall off the narrative entirely as if their episode is over and we need not circle back around. Its a symptom of its jumble of half-hearted subplots, abandoned gags, interrupted themes. But its thin plot and dead-end characterizations were a match for the frictionless plotting and bland animation that lacks the detail and glow that the other Disney works manage. I sat stupefied as it kept slipping under my lowering expectations.

I found my mind wandering—and stay with me, this will seem like a tangent at first, but will make sense by the end—to this year’s surprise hit video from YouTuber Jenny Nicholson: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. I couldn’t believe I actually liked it, let alone watched the whole thing. The video really shouldn’t work. Anyone with allergies to chirpy, weirdly-lit, direct-to-camera monologues of nerd-culture exegesis (complete with some cute cosplay), not to mention those who’d never want to hear about a stranger’s vacation, would be rightly suspicious, especially as this one ticks methodically toward the four-hour mark. I was skeptical. But it’s somehow improbably one of the year’s best documentaries as Nicholson, an engaging storyteller, only starts with a thorough recounting of her miserable stay at Disney World’s poorly executed, and sooner than later shuttered, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel. She's comprehensive in her dissection of the attraction's lifespan and every error along the way, threading it into her actual footage of experiencing its failures in person. Her thoroughness itself becomes a great source of humor that accumulates laughs as it goes. Who’d have thought a recurring cutaway to a pole obstructing the view of a dinner show would be one of the funniest moments of the year? Each new stumble in her trip becomes not a self-pitying home video, but a new plank in the scaffolding for a larger argument about the current failures of the company at large.

Along the way she’s built up the evidence to land a bigger point about the dreary state of Disney’s modern business practices. From this one ill-conceived hotel—wrong on everything from the technology to the price to the design of the over-promised, under-delivered role-playing experience—she widens the lens to consider the increasingly consumer-unfriendly corner-cutting at the customer’s expense. It’s a picture of a company that thinks its name-recognition and family fandoms will keep people paying more for less. In her conclusion, she says “…maybe Disney's right, and they're too big to fail, and people won't like it, but they'll just keep coming back and paying more and more…and feeling worse and worse about it.” Moana 2 strikes me as a product of the same corporate thinking. Here’s something vaguely like what you loved before. It’s awful now, but Disney hopes we’ll keep paying for it. I found myself feeling sorry for the kids who’ll be seeing this for how low its opinion is of their interests and capacity. I found myself sad for the adults who’ll get their time wasted chaperoning those kids. I found myself depressed for the fine artists and storytellers at the studio who could do better if given the resources and directive. And I found myself, strangely enough, feeling disappointed for Moana. She was such a strong, interesting, lovable character that it seems insulting that this is what’s she’s been reduced to.

Broken Homes: ENCANTO and FLEE

Encanto is an atypical Disney animated musical. Sure, it has the twirling and singing and magic and cute kids and animal sidekicks. But it’s also curiously interior—literally and psychologically—concerning itself mostly with feelings of anxiety and insecurity among the enchanted family nestled safe, but not so sound, in a fantastical house in a small Colombian village. The usual Disney lively likable misfit protagonist is middle daughter Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz), a plucky, curly-haired, bespectacled do-gooder who feels left out of the family specialness, since she’s the only one who wasn’t bestowed a magical power. The grandmother matriarch presides over their home with a glowing miracle candle gifted her out of the ether upon the death of her husband at the hands of marauders fifty years prior. Since then it’s filled their home with sentient floors and banisters, cupboards, counters, and stairs. And every other member has a gift to share—super-hearing, power-lifting, shape-shifting, plant-sprouting, medicinal cooking, weather-controlling, animal-talking, prophesying. 

The plot of the movie concerns Mirabel’s attempts to make herself valuable to the family by saving their flickering flame, suddenly vulnerable for the first time in decades. To do so, she’ll need to grapple with discovering various family member’s own insecurities, and learns along the way that she’s not the only one who feels pressure to live up to the family name and expectations that come with it. Each song, provided by Lin-Manuel Miranda with his usual rat-a-tat wordplay and love of rhyming rounds and recurring motifs, returns to this theme, with several characters given numbers that express their internal struggles, and a few group numbers full of family gossip about others’. This is strangely rocky territory for a bustling, busy animated musical—at once cramped and complicated—and it never really takes off like a Moana or Frozen. But what it has in spades is personality, bursting to the seams with side characters and flowing with seemingly authentic Columbian style—food and language and clothes and flowers exploding in colorful flourishes. It’s a thoroughly well-intentioned picture.

Flee is a far different animated experience in form and content—although, oddly enough, it treads some similar thematic grounds. It’s a story of a family threading to be splintered, and yet bound together by love. It’s about generational trauma, how good fortune in the face of long odds can become the root of insecurity. This one happens to be true. It’s a documentary animated out of necessity as it’s the testimony of an Afghan refugee who wished to remain anonymous. Because he’s an old friend of director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he’s willing to give his testimony to the project. Provided the name Amin for the purposes of this film, he narrates the story of his happy early years in Afghanistan, and the sorrowful reasons his family decided to leave their homeland for Europe. Amin details a harrowing journey of a displaced child sent off from the only place he knew, tossed into the unknown. It gets all the more isolating when the family is splintered out of the necessities of various border crossings and asylum claims. Eventually he ends up a young person alone in Denmark, carrying so many painful memories and secrets that must be kept to ensure he stays and survives in this new country. 

Rasmussen sketches out the details by guiding in lovely, spare hand-drawn animation—fluid and simple, with soft colors, precise personal details, and evocative gestures—that conjures the gentle spirit and sensitive memories of his subject. The conversation on the audio stays at a relative even-keel, with Amin’s soft-spoken precision, and some subtle stumbling over the most difficult moments, carrying the narrative along. As he grows into himself, the journey of self-discovery is not only a refugee’s double-consciousness, but as a budding intellectual, and a gay man, he’s filled with reasons to feel apart from the others. Rasumussen helps to bring these complications to a full flowering, and the film becomes less a catalogue of struggles, and more a tribute to his friend’s resilience. Here’s a loving portrait of man’s ability to bloom where you’re planted, and to find strength in the very roots that might also be the source of one’s regrets and anxieties.

Part of Her World: RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON

The non-musical, non-animal Disney animated movies sure are a strange bunch when you get right down to it. Where the song-and-dance spectacles fall into comforting patterns and rhythms with fine variation of tone and character within a consistently sturdy artistry, and the animal efforts generally have a lighter dance across comedy, even if some still dip into heavier emotions, these just spring off at odd angles. There’s the darkly uneven Black Cauldron and the rip-roaring pulp sci-fi Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the buoyant superhero lark Big Hero 6 and the smirking video game goof Wreck-It Ralph, the slapdash mania of Chicken Little and the zippy time-travel loop-de-loop Meet the Robinsons. Some are fun and eccentric; others are mystifying misfires. I suppose you can’t blame them for trying.

The latest, Raya and the Last Dragon, plays it safe. It at first acts like a Moana without the great songs. It, too, is about a headstrong only child of a noble king who must set out across the wilderness to save her people. What’s different here is that Raya — a plucky martial arts expert with a pleasant father — is responsible for a dystopian wasteland after a childhood mistake leaves a precious dragon stone broken and scattered among her country’s five warring factions. The magic jewel was the only thing protecting their lands from rampaging smoking, sparking, purple blobs that turn people to stone. Only by reuniting the pieces can Raya hope to restore the frozen victims, and maybe bring lasting peace to their people. It’s more adventure than princess movie, giving her no family conflict or a need for romance, only tasks to complete to save the world.

The film becomes more formula than narrative — fetch quests unfurled like video game levels, as Raya heists them one at a time, gathering allies along the way, with each new village a chance for imaginative production design and costumes. There’s a lake-town market with a thriving pickpocket economy, a warrior clan nestled in a snowy bamboo forest, and a towering citadel where a matriarchy of regal side-parts rules. This is an impeccably imagined space, an East Asian fusion that understands we’d love a good map, even as the plot within it is cobbled together from fantasy novels and anime epics (shades of Naussica and Mononoke, for sure), martial arts period pieces and side-scrolling adventures. The characters’ designs and weapons — like a sword that unfolds into a combination whip and grappling hook — are cool, Raya cuts a sleek look, and the dragons of old have a Chinese New Year appeal. There’s a bevy of supporting villains, each cartoon threatening in his or her own way, and more cute critters and kids than you'd expect. I was never less than involved in the look and flow and tone of the thing. But it never quite digs in to the emotions with the same tight grip Disney maintains at its best. Here, though, you’re never far from a striking frame, or an admirable beat of economically deployed subtext: a cut to an empty crib that explains a lonely warrior’s sadness without a word, a glance at a statue on a bridge that pings a character’s sad motivation, a soft look of suspicion exchanged between people who really should be friends but for old betrayals. Raya herself can be a bit of a cipher, but her world is bursting with life, characters, and a wisecracking comedic relief fantasy creature. You can see how a kid could get lost in its mythology.

A Boy and His Robot: BIG HERO 6

Turns out there’s some creative life left in the superhero movie. It just took Disney Animation to step away from the endless synergy, in-jokes, crossovers, and five-year plans to find it. Their team of computer animation artists took Big Hero 6, a Marvel comic so obscure their corporate cousins didn’t want to hold onto it for their massive Cinematic Universe, and focused on telling a contained story and doing it well. The result has everything you’d expect from a superhero movie: a tragic inciting incident, tight suits, high-tech gadgets, a supervillain with a connection to the heroes, and a finale involving a massive energy beam and billions of dollars in property damage. So it’s nothing new. But by keeping it simple and energetic, Disney has made the brightest and most colorful superhero movie in quite some time. It reminded me why I ever liked these kinds of stories in the first place.

Directors Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt) create a vivid near-future mashup metropolis called San Fransokyo, filled with a variety of architectures and influences from its portmanteau component inspirations. Fans, like me, of imaginary cities should get a kick out of it, even more so in 3D. But that’s the set dressing whizzing by in the backgrounds. The filmmakers take their time building the characters, confident enough to be bustling with worldbuilding spectacle firmly in the background, as sci-fi concepts drive the plot without taking over.

We meet Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), a 14-year-old robotics genius who graduated high school early and isn’t feeling up to college. Instead, he makes money gambling in illegal back alley robot fights. But his older brother (Daniel Henney) insists on introducing him to the high tech robotics lab on campus, tempting him with promise of resources and collaborators to help him achieve his fullest potential. It’s a strong brotherly bond we observe, which makes its quick severing all the more impactful. There’s a fire at a science fair and it claims the older boy’s life, leaving the younger depressed and lonely.

Hiro’s only companion is the prototype healthcare robot his brother built and left behind. The robot, named Baymax, is the film’s best creation. He’s built to be huggable. A large, inflated, soft plastic body makes him look something like a robo-Totoro. There’s a rubbery squeak to his every movement. He speaks (charmingly voiced by Scott Adsit) in loveably logical constructions and programmed intelligence that slowly accrues personality. When his battery is low, he sounds drunk. He’s a fantastic presence, bursting to life diagnosing Hiro. Observing the boy’s depression, the bot’s programming determines that cheering him up will be his mission, even if it means helping to track down the arsonist behind the fire. Hiro doesn’t waste any time building Baymax slick armor and programming him some kung fu knowledge.

As the boy and his robot build a relationship that helps bring the boy purpose in life, the film doesn’t have time to spend moping and brooding, launching quickly into the fun. It helps to have a bright palate filled with vibrant young characters. The older brother’s robotics classmates join Hiro and Baymax’s quest for justice, and are eager to form a makeshift superhero team to help do so. It’s a typical origin story, with mourning geniuses who have access to incredible high-tech gadgetry vowing to set things right. But the film gets a great deal of humor and excitement out of the characters’ repartee and diversity. There’s a goofy geek (T.J. Miller), a sunny egghead (Genesis Rodriguez), a serious gearhead (Jamie Chung), and a muscled nerd (Damon Wayons Jr.). Together with the cute robot and precocious teen, who help them turn their lab experiments into suits and weapons, they form a group that’s fun to be around, and the sense of camaraderie and individuality doesn’t disappear when the action starts.

That’s what ultimately sets Big Hero 6 apart from the competition. Even charming superhero teams like The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy get swallowed up by the spectacle. But these characters, by virtue of their animation, don’t disappear into CGI costumes and stunt doubles. Their movements and personalities are constant whether running from swarms of nanobots or sitting around a table. Their talents and gadgets are well developed for clever payoffs in clear, confident comic book framing turned fluid motion. Animation needs thought behind every motion, every gesture, every frame. They don’t waste time animating endless punching matches and collateral damage to be chopped to ribbons in an editing bay. Apparently the way to improve the culture-dominating live-action cartoons is to bring them closer to their roots.

Here rambunctious action is well timed and staged, used sparingly. There’s cleverness and coherence to the construction of these sequences, so the action doesn’t grow exhausting. It’s informed by character and, even better, manages to be exciting and energetic without imperiling thousands of innocent lives. It’s actually a buoyant superhero action movie about the value of life, and the futility of violence. You’d think movies ostensibly about characters who save people would figure that out a little more often. The more time we spend watching the interplay between the boy, his robot, and their new friends, enjoying the humor and feeling the sadness of their loss, the more impact the handful of action sequences have.

I cared about the relationships, as formulaic as they are. The voice work is appealing. The character designs are the usual rubbery realism of Disney CG animation. And their world is so colorful and full of energy. It’s a good reminder that formula storytelling gets to be that way because once upon a time the structures worked. In Big Hero 6, it works. On a plot level, there’s not a single surprise to be had, but I was swept up in its momentum and imagination. Running a trim 108 minutes, it’s the first superhero movie in a decade to leave me wanting more in a good way. What a difference having loveable characters, pleasing design, economical storytelling, coherent themes, and action that doesn’t outstay its welcome makes.

Breaking the Ice: FROZEN

In Frozen, family dynamics ice over an entire kingdom and the thawing process takes down some of the typical Disney formula with it. The latest Disney animated movie is an earnest and refreshingly unwinking princess story with plenty of conflict, but no easy villain, and nice romance, without the ultimate fate of any character depending upon it. It’s not a total evolution for the studio, but nor should it be. Despite some staleness, the Disney formula isn’t broken and certainly has its charms, with big-eyed storybook characters, beautifully designed and exquisitely shaded landscapes, and heartfelt schmaltzy fairy tale endings. But this new film, like Tangled, Disney’s 2010 riff on Rapunzel, takes the raw materials of an old story, this time Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” and injects into it a great deal of musical charm and surprising psychological depth. Tangled built its drama out of a smothering mother/daughter relationship warped by mother’s wicked witch status. With Frozen, there’s a hint of magic powers powering sisterly tensions that explodes in metaphor to be thrillingly resolved.

Jennifer Lee’s screenplay is a built on a relationship between two sisters, a dynamic rarely explored seriously, let alone allowed to power the entire plot of a major Hollywood family picture. Here, the sisters are Elsa and Anna, princesses in the kingdom of Arendell. As giggly little girls, they’re best friends, eager to play with slightly older Elsa’s magical abilities to generate and manipulate ice and snow. But a near tragedy leaves Elsa feeling shame. She remembers what happened, how she nearly caused the death of her sister with her growing powers. Her parents, understandably worried, close the gates of the kingdom and sequester Elsa, the better to keep Anna safe unaware of her sister’s capabilities. But Anna doesn’t remember her near-death experience and so reads the events as an inexplicable icing over of a beloved relationship. This is a rather nuanced and powerful exploration of sibling dynamics, and it comes to drive the conflict of the story to come.

Through a series of misunderstandings, Elsa ends up in self-imposed exile at the snowy top of a mountain and it’s up to Anna to find her and bring her back to the kingdom. Their falling out is infecting the whole kingdom, Elsa’s uncontrollable powers unwittingly sending Arendell into a permanent winter, at least until this situation is resolved. There’s a great blue, purple and white color palate to the iced over land. It gives new meaning – and good metaphoric use – to having an icy relationship with a relative. The script allows both women to grow slightly into their young adulthood, finding maturity through crisis, and learn how to love each other, magic power or not. The plot depends upon it. So does their relationship and, by extension, their kingdom.

Elsa and Anna are charmingly and expressively voiced by Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell. They imbue their roles with nuance, wit, depth of feeling, and a fine sense of sisterly tensions and affections. They have great voices, relaxed, funny, and tearful, before leaping octaves and scaling effortlessly into terrific pop ballads and Broadway numbers of the kind associated with the Disney Renaissance style of the 90s, with memorable music and lyrics by veterans of 2011’s Winnie the Pooh and Disney Channel’s Phineas & Ferb, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. Bell’s the star here, shouldering the bulk of the journey to the mountaintop and the struggle to reconcile sisterly differences and getting a few witty songs along the way. But it’s Menzel who gets the showstopper yearning ballad in which she begins the process of learning to love herself for who she is. It’s a family movie about princesses that’s all about how they get along by embracing what makes them unique and bolstering their self-confidence. What a refreshing sight.

Elsewhere in the story there’s a handsome prince (Santino Fontana) and a handsome young ice merchant (Jonathan Groff). The former starts out looking like the romantic figure, but stays behind, wishing Anna good luck on her journey, while the latter ends up helping her, tagging along as sidekick and maybe potential love interest. And, perhaps in a concession to Disney formula, Anna is joined by obligatory comic relief in the form of a big puppy dog of a reindeer and a small, funny, sentient snowman. He’s voiced by Josh Gad and gets a sort of clever little song about how much he wants to see summer. The little guy grew on me as the main characters make their journey and run into exciting complications.

The movie is a comfortable and comforting blend of Disney old and new. Directors Chris Buck (co-director of 1999’s Tarzan) and Jennifer Lee (in her directorial debut) oversee a production with sparkling fractals of visual delight, with rounded edges in the backgrounds and of the character design and giving it the best computer animated approximation of the studio’s hand-drawn house style. The music is lush and stuck in my head as I type this now, easily passing the leaving-the-theater-humming test.

Though I was enjoying the voice work, the dazzling animation, and wonderful songs, it surprised me how invested I was in the story. It’s involving enough I managed to wonder (or worry?) for a moment or two that Disney wouldn’t provide us with an uncomplicatedly happy ending. But maybe best of all is the way the conflict is built entirely out of the sister’s relationship and the villainous or romantic complications don’t ultimately factor into its creation or solution. Frozen’s commitment to making and keeping these princesses fully formed characters with a deeply felt relationship makes the film so satisfying and moving, even as it’s still a grand Disney entertainment in the best sense.

Quick Look: THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY

In a world of rapid-fire CGI quips from Hollywood, it’s refreshing to disappear into the world of a hand-drawn Studio Ghibli film from Japan. It’s a calm, patient oasis in the middle of a hectic modern world. Their newest film to be brought by Disney to our shores is The Secret World of Arrietty, a version of Mary Norton’s book The Borrowers adapted by Ghibli’s rightly beloved co-creator Hayao Miyazaki. The story follows a family of toy-sized people who live under the floorboards and in the walls of an old house in the countryside, sneaking into rooms at night to borrow only what they need: a cube of sugar, a tissue, a pin. As the movie begins, a sickly young boy shows up to live with his aunt and get some rest in advance of a risky surgery that is necessary to save his life. He thinks he spots these fabled little people; the thought delights him. The little family, daughter Arrietty, her steady father and excitable mother, think they’ve been spotted too; the thought terrifies them. It’s a movie about survival, but only in the quietest, most melancholic sense. It’s a movie about learning to be kind to your neighbors, to take chances in learning to understand one another. It’s sweet and simple, but with a lovely attention to emotional – and, in true Ghibli fashion, visual – detail. Animator and first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi creates a world of new perspectives, following the borrowers’ point of view, which shows our world from a much lower angle, then switching to the boy’s view, making the common world uncommon. Ultimately, the film doesn’t have the majesty of Miyazaki’s own masterworks, but its still moving in a modest way. Like all of the great Studio Ghilbi films, it traces an invisible line between reality and fantasy, between nature and magic, with nimble beauty and heartfelt skill.

Stuffed with Fluff: WINNIE THE POOH

I don’t see how any lover of animation, and certainly any fan of Winnie the Pooh, could be disappointed in Winnie the Pooh, a lovingly hand-drawn animated feature that hews closely to the original tone and structure of the A.A. Milne picture books as filtered through the indelible visual design of the 1960’s Disney shorts based on them and compiled in the altogether wonderful 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. This new film collects the familiar characters in their familiar setting and allows them to behave in predictably mild and sweet ways. Perhaps the strangest and most notable thing about this feature, especially now in 2011, is how simple and unconcerned with posturing it is.

Directors Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall (along with their small army of writers and animators) are decidedly uninterested in straining for artificial hipness. There is ease and comfortability with which the production slips into the simple, charming rhythms of a life with Pooh bear in the Hundred Acre Wood. Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings) just wants his honey – his tummy, after all, is awfully grumbly – and the crux of the film is finding ways to thwart that desire, to create situations that will pull the character into choices between finding honey and helping others. Sometimes, he will fail, and succumb to the visions of honey pots dancing in his head like a Busby Berkeley number, but eventually Pooh learns to put others first. At least until his tummy starts grumbling again.

Between Pooh and his honey is a collection of familiar characters with various immediate goals. The depressive donkey named Eeyore (Bud Luckey) loses his tail. The bouncy, flouncy Tigger (Jim Cummings, again) thinks he just might need a sidekick. Owl (Craig Ferguson, an unexpected choice) is writing his memoirs. Rabbit (Tom Kenny) is tending his garden. Kanga  (Kristen Anderson-Lopez) is knitting a scarf for Roo (Wyatt Dean Hall). Piglet (Travis Oates) is – oh, d-d-d-dear! – so nervous. These are characters that are cheerfully stationary in their personalities, which have a kind of warmhearted purity of spirit in their sweet simplicity. It’s nice to see them again because we know they will fall into predictable patterns. The voice work, an eclectic mix to be sure, is comforting in its way of seeming to fit the memory of what they sounded like in the past. There are differences in some of the interpretations but by and large they fit. After all, the voices are a just as predictable part of the characters as their personalities

But that’s not to say the film itself is overly predictable. Simplicity is the key here, not a kind of watery sameness or dumb homogenized energy, but a simple reverence for childhood and a true respect for a very young target audience. Their surrogate, the imaginative little British boy Christopher Robin (Jack Boulter), serves as a bridge between the “real world” and the world of these ambulatory animated stuffed animals. He is never explicitly shown to be the creator of this gentle fantasy. He’s a participant and, when absent, a recipient of reverence and respect from these creatures. There’s a playful storybook atmosphere that harkens back to Disney’s earlier efforts of adaptation.

Narrator John Cleese will break into banter with the imaginary characters, sometimes even shaking the book or finding his patience tried when the drawings collide or otherwise interact with the text on the page. There’s a love of reading, of wordplay, present in the film that helps to create an atmosphere of sweet sophistication. It may seem all a bit simple and distant to a jaded adult audience, but for kids I would imagine that the film has a wonderful sense of being pitched at exactly the right level, with just enough to engage the very young precisely where they are and even occasionally thrillingly just enough beyond where they are. It’s a refreshingly small feature, topping out at just over an hour, padded to feature length with a delightful post-credits scene, a syrupy pre-feature short, and sweet songs sung by Zooey Deschanel. Its modest scale makes it entirely perfect for what it is, a grand first theatrical experience for a small child while also serving as a small dose of nostalgia for those who love and cherish the everlasting reliability that these characters will remain exactly who they are for now and forever.

Long Beautiful Hair: TANGLED

Disney’s latest animated feature is Tangled, a retelling of the story of Rapunzel, the princess with the incredibly long golden hair. The film’s a straight-up fairy tale, no apologies. It doesn’t feel the need to wink at the audience, distancing itself from the formula for cheap gags or in a bid for elusive contemporary coolness. That kind of hedging and equivocating has infected not just Disney films, but many animated family films in the last decade. There was a rush to learn from Pixar’s example by using computer animation, while overlooking the true strengths of Pixar: sincerity and simple emotion, the same qualities that Disney itself once knew by heart.

With Tangled, Disney finds its way back to its sweet spot, building on last year’s good first step with Princess and the Frog. Their latest film is sweet and charming. It’s not exactly innovating, but it’s fresh and surprisingly powerful. In Dan Fogelman’s script, Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) has been locked in a tower for her entire childhood. The evil Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) has raised her as her daughter after kidnapping the infant princess. You see, Rapunzel’s hair is a fountain of youth. Now, on the precipice of adulthood, Rapunzel yearns to explore the outside world. Of course, for all this time, the king and queen have been searching for their missing daughter. Gothel knows that to let Rapunzel leave the tower would mean to lose youth forever.

The film is filled with rich mother issues. It’s essentially a stand-off between an old view of femininity that tells women to stay locked in a domestic setting, useful only for their physical qualities, and a modern view of women as complete, resourceful individuals of great inherent worth, with talents and insights well worth sharing with the outside world. Rapunzel’s small, personal rebellion against her “mother” consists of secretly cultivating myriad talents. Gothel knows the girl paints, bakes, reads, thinks, and dreams (for starters), but does she know how well? And does she even begin to realize the girl’s potential? She keeps Rapunzel captive by subtly undermining her self-esteem. The film sits on this conflict, deepened by the sense of awful betrayal at the center. Rapunzel has a love for this maternal figure that is painfully sad to us in the audience, aware as we are of the kidnapping.

Dropping into the tower to complicate the plot is Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi), a thief who, by ditching his thuggish partners-in-crime (Ron Perlman), has just barely escaped the royal guards chasing him. To Rapunzel he represents both a novelty and an opportunity. He is the outside world and all the promise and danger that entails. She talks him into escorting her outside the tower, so together they climb down, kicking off a plot that is a well-oiled machine consisting of various overlapping chases. Mother Gothel’s on the hunt for Rapunzel while two groups, both the royal guards and the cheated thugs, are on the trail of Flynn. The film develops into a bright and sunny chase picture with plenty of funny little detours and zippy, exciting action sequences.

It’s never a possibility to forget that it’s a Disney picture, filled as it is with the trappings of the Disney formula, but that’s hardly a burden in this case. Rather than feeling rote, these elements soar by being exceptionally well done. Co-directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard have made the best animated feature to come out of Disney since 2002’s Lilo and Stitch and the studio's best fairy tale since 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. The animation is a gorgeous, rounded CG style that is a close approximation to the traditional Disney 2D style. (It even uses the new 3D technology to lovely effect). The songs are delightful (if not immediately catchy), the supporting characters are likable, and the animal sidekicks are more than ready for their reaction shots. A goofy little chameleon is surprisingly subdued for a sidekick, with cute, nonverbal expressiveness. Even better is a mute law-enforcement horse that engages in a single-minded pursuit that gallops through the film bringing only hilarious antics.

And, of course, what would a Disney movie be without a romance? The relationship between Flynn and Rapunzel develops with admirable restraint, emerging slowly and cautiously out of the characters themselves. There’s never a sense that she needs a man to rescue her. (If any saving happens in the film, she saves him, or they save each other). Nor is there a sense that the romance is what’s driving her curiosity. She learns that she’s self-sufficient. Her romance develops along with her love of the outside world.

More than the average family film, and certainly more than anything Disney has done in a decade, Tangled packs plenty of emotion into a breezily entertaining romp. It’s pleasantly complicated and surprisingly touching. This is a film of direct, earnestly simple, skillfully playful, and self-assured storytelling that builds (in advance of its very satisfying climax) to one of the most beautiful sequences to hit the big screen all year. It starts with a tear running down a monarch’s face and ends with hundreds of floating lanterns surrounding a pair of potential lovers in a rowboat. It's surprisingly moving sequences like this, especially when they hit with such unexpected force, that make the movies worthwhile.

Almost There: THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

It was a sad day when it was announced in 2004 that the pretty awful Home on the Range would be the Walt Disney Company’s last work of hand-drawn animation. The medium responsible for all of that studio’s greatest artistic achievements, from Snow White and Pinocchio to Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, was being thrown overboard in order to better jump on the CG bandwagon, a wagon that was already plenty full with Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony and BlueSky, among others. So it is a relief to see The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s return to what they do best, classical storytelling with hand-drawn style. Sure enough, the film doesn’t disappoint on the visual front, each frame filled with fluid beauty that resonates with equal parts wonder and nostalgia. The mild failings of the movie have been left to fall solely on the storytelling.

Featuring the first black princess in the company’s history (about time!), the story is a smart, if a little derivative, retelling of the Prince who becomes a frog and must be kissed to reverse the spell. The voice work is uniformly excellent with Anika Noni Rose and Bruno Campos as thoroughly delightful leads. The leads are thoroughly charming; the prince dances like Gene Kelly and the princess has a weary grace about her. You see, she’s not actually a princess, but rather a hard-working waitress mistaken for a princess by the frog prince when he stumbles upon her at a masquerade ball on the first night of Mardi Gras. The film takes place in a lovingly recreated 1920’s New Orleans, with zydeco and jazz influencing Randy Newman’s soundtrack and Cajun cooking practically wafting off the screen. It’s an enchanting location for a sweet little adventure, especially since, not being a princess, she becomes a frog post-kiss and the two of them escape to the bayou.

At times though, the thrust of the story is lost amidst the strain of the Disney folks stretching their artistic muscles to the point where it feels like the creative team is working off of a checklist of classic Disney features. There’s an overflow of fully animated musical numbers and, while many are charming and striking, they trip over each other and too few really stick. There are more than enough charming animal sidekicks (a dog, a turtle, a gator, a family of fireflies) and plenty of human types as well (people fat and skinny, tall and short, snaky and prim, white and black, smart and hick). It’s nice to see that the Disney animators have such a wide range of skill in producing so many of the character types that have been used in the past, but were they all needed in the same picture?

So, the movie’s a little busy and at times frantic or just plain unmemorable and the plot muddles a bit more than necessary, but I barely care. There are a host of wonderful moments as well, times where the plot zigs where hundreds of animated features have always zagged and quiet character moments that are genuinely touching. There’s also a memorable villain in the form of a voodoo witchdoctor (Keith David) who gets the most memorable song and some genuinely creepy henchmen. And, above all, I like the leads. They were well-voiced, well-designed, and easy to care about. I only wish they weren’t frogs for so much of the film; they make much more appealing humans.

Now get back to work, you fine folk of Disney. I’m ready for another hand-drawn masterpiece from you.