Explorers

Explorers, by Joe Dante, 1985

How did this movie escape my childhood?  I loved all those 80's adventure movies about kids like me.  The Goonies, Monster Squad, and E.T. were all staples.  Well, I didn't see Monster Squad until a little later, but it became a staple once I did.  Explorers is right along the lines of these movies, and if I'd had it on tape as a kid, it would probably have been just as worn out as my copies of the above movies.

Joe Dante is also one of my favorite directors of that whole period.  I've yet to see a Joe Dante film that I didn't like.  His films always at least attempted to be commercial, yet they tended to skew just a little bit more off-kilter than his peers, such as Zemeckis, Donner, and Spielberg, did, and that quirk appealed to an odd little kid like me.  Dante's films were also brimming with sincere personal touches and his love for the campy B-Movies of his youth.

Explorers may in many ways be up there with Matinee as Dante's most personal film.  It stars two children who look an awful lot like River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke as a couple of kids who are given instructions in their dreams on how to unlock the secrets of interstellar travel.  Along with a third boy, they use this dream technology to clandestinely build their own spaceship and take it to the stars.  There, they, you know, meet aliens and stuff.

Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix are both great in their roles.  Hawke is the normal everyday kid, yearning to escape his life for a while and perhaps explore some uncharted territories.  Phoenix is his nerdy best friend, who is a science prodigy, and able to translate the technology in his dreams into physical reality.  There's a third kid, too, played by Jason Presson.  I actually liked his character a lot, but he wasn't in it nearly as much as his co-stars.  There were even some shots where the three of them were supposed to be sitting next to each other, yet the camera was only on the other two kids.  I wonder if there was some circumstance that prevented him from being in the movie as much as the other two?  Maybe he was difficult, or wasn't available as to shoot as much.

We also get bit parts by Joe Dante regulars, such as Dick Miller and Robert Picardo, who actually has three roles, two of them completely unrecognizable under some crazy alien prosthetics.  And James Cromwell plays River Phoenix's dad.

Explorers is a spirited, adventurous movie for younger children and nostalgic 30-year-olds, and it seems heavily inspired by Dante's own childhood, growing up in the thick of the space race, reading comic books and watching science fiction movies.  Though the film's third act in space is fun, I actually liked the parts of the movie before they leave the earth better.  There are some great sequences involving them building their ship out of old amusement park ride parts, and testing it out in front of a drive-in movie theater.  Even though these scenes had the fantastic elements, I could relate much more to kids scrounging around and using their creative minds to build stuff.  Once they get to space and meet aliens, it's a little out of my wheelhouse,though I'm sure I imagined doing just that a million times.  Which is really what the movie is all about: exploring that vast universe inside yourself.

ParaNorman

ParaNorman, by Sam Fell and Chris Butler, 2012


The folks over at Laika seem poised to take over for Tim Burton as the top purveyors of macabre-stop-motion-animated-movies-for-kids-who-don't-mind-being-a-little-scared. I loved their previous effort, 2009's Coraline, but was unsure if they would be able to repeat their success without the Neil Gaiman source material and the direction by Tim Burton collaborator Henry Selick, whose modern classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas, really kick started the whole macabre-stop-motion-animated-movies-for-kids-who-don't-mind-being-a-little-scared genre in the first place.

Well, I'm pleased to report that Laika's latest film, ParaNorman, directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler, is really good stuff. It's the story of Norman, a little boy saddled with the ability to communicate with ghosts. His family and the kids at school think he's weird, so Norman pretty much spends his time watching monster movies and talking to his dead grandmother. When the town's resident crazy man, Norman's uncle, dies and passes on his responsibilities to his nephew, Norman must now tame an ancient curse on the town of Blithe Hollow, a New England village that has a Salem-esque witch trial in its history.

ParaNorman plays the horror fairly straight. It's not too intense for older kids, but it can be quite morbid at times, even including a scene where Norman must break into his uncle's home and pry a book from the hands of his uncle's stiff corpse. There are ghosts and zombies and witches, too. The movie has its share of laughs, too, largely provided by Norman's new friend, a pudgy weird kid named Neil, but the comedy is secondary, there to lighten up a fairly dark kids story.

Though the characters are somewhat similar in design to those in Coraline, ParaNorman is drawing its look from completely different sources. Where Coraline looks heavily inspired by Eastern European animation, ParaNorman looks to have taken their aesthetic from German expressionist films and the early Universal monster movies. Lots of angles, and not a straight line in the movie, besides maybe Norman's hair, which stands straight up on his head. I also loved that all of the characters were slightly asymmetrical, with differently sized eyes, and uneven mouths and so on. In most animation, symmetry is the name of the game, so this just adds to the slightly off-kilter feel of the film, while at the same time maybe reflecting real life a little bit more as well.

Anyway, ParaNorman is worth watching, especially if you or your children are into the macabre-stop-motion-animated-movies-for-kids-who-don't-mind-being-a-little-scared genre. I think I would have really liked it as a kid, and I was (and kind of still am) a little wuss. We still have a few months to go, but it might end up being my favorite macabre-stop-motion-animated-movies-for-kids-who-don't-mind-being-a-little-scared movie of the year. I'll hold my judgment on that until I see Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, though.

Matilda

For some reason, I didn't grow up with the stories of Roald Dahl. I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory many many times over, but nobody ever told me there were books! I would have loved them as a kid. It wasn't until adulthood that I started reading Roald Dahl's children's books, and even a collection of his adult short stories. I actually just read Matilda for the first time last year.

Adapted into a film in 1996 with Danny DeVito directing, Matilda is the story of a special little girl (Mara Wilson), born to the wrong family. Her dad (DeVito) is a greedy scam artist who runs a crooked used car dealership, and her mother (Rhea Perlman) is a preening, beauty-obsessed, Bingo-addict. While Matilda teaches herself to read and write at a very early age, her parents and big brother mostly ignore her, but sometimes berate her for not being more like they are.

As the years pass, Matilda proves herself more and more gifted, able to do long math, spending her days reading library books rather than watch game shows with her family. After a while, she sees her family for what they are, and decides that little kids aren't necessarily the only ones that need to be punished. She decides that when her dad does something especially bad, she'll turn the tables on him with a prank of some sort.

But when Matilda goes to school, she learns that her parents are the least of her worries. The monstrous and sadistic headmistress, The Trunchbull, is known for locking children in small rooms and throwing little girls by spinning them around by their pigtails. Matilda decides she must use her gifts to free her school of the tyranny of the Trunchbull.

More often than not, Dahl's books tend to make good movies. He never talked down to kids, and often wrote some strange and scary things. Matilda is loaded with that kind of stuff, with her mean, borderline abusive parents, and the villainous headmistress. But I can't see a kid being too scared, because they know Matilda is smarter than the grownups and will always have the upper hand.

DeVito does a great job adapting the story. He uses his trademark quirky visual style to create a fantastical world that feels true to Dahl's writing. He's also hilarious as Matilda's father. It's possibly some of the funniest acting of his career. Mara Wilson was quite a discovery for the role of Matilda, cute and innocent enough to get away with committing mischievous acts of revenge on adults without ever losing the viewers' support in this.

Of all the Roald Dahl films, Matilda may be the truest to the source material. As much as I love Willy Wonka and Fantastic Mr. Fox, they do both deviate from the books a good deal. I wish I hadn't missed out on this guy's books when I was at the age to properly appreciate them. Come to think of it, I have a niece and nephew who probably have no idea what they're missing. Perhaps it's time to change that.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

I was going to just skip writing a review for this movie. It's actually okay, but nothing to write home about. But guess what? I am obsessive compulsive. I don't think it's that bad a case, but it's bad enough that my brain absolutely will not allow me to skip over a movie for my dumb little blog! So I reached a compromise with my broken-record brain: This is a secret review. Kind of a hidden Easter Egg. I'm not going to direct anybody to it through links on Twitter or Facebook, because I have nothing of value to talk about with this movie. But if you happen to be a regular reader (mostly friends and family) or you stumble across this while searching for something else, well, here's your reward!

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is based on an old kid's book that my wife says is really good. It's directed by Stuart Orme, who I have no knowledge of. It's about two little girls who are left at their family manor in the care of a distant cousin. The cousin turns out to be evil, and takes over the house and claim to the manor, forcing the two girls into hard labor. With the help of some of the friendlier servants and some kid who lives in the cave, the girls journey to London to get their crazy distant cousin lady off their lawn. There are also wolves.

That's the long and short of it. Okay, that's really just the short of it. There's some kind of spooky stuff for kids in there. You know, in that age-old Dickensian British way, with the mean aunts mistreating kids and all that. I bet this freaked out some little English kids in the 80's.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was watchable, but I guess that fact is going to remain our little secret. I wish I had a prize for whoever finds it, because that would be fun. Good bye!

The Secret World of Arrietty

Nothing will keep me away from a new movie by Studio Ghibli on opening weekend. Like Pixar, they've earned that trust. One after another, they have released movies with lush, beautifully animated, fully realized fantasy worlds, and relatable, human stories.

The newest Ghibli film, The Secret World of Arrietty, is a little different. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Arrietty takes our own daily home environment and resizes it into a vast, dangerous world full of adventure and peril.

Based on the classic series of children's novels The Borrowers, The Secret World of Arrietty is the story of Arrietty, a tiny girl who lives under the floorboards of a country house with her stern, protective father, and her jumpy, fearful mother. They are Borrowers, a secret race of bug-sized people who live off of the items that human beings, or Beans, as they call them, don't need or will never miss.

On her first Borrowing outing with her father, Arrietty is mistakenly seen by Sean, a sickly Bean boy her own age, staying at the country home with his aunts while awaiting a heart surgery. Sean has long been told of the little people in the floor by his mother, who never stopped believing in them.

As Sean reaches out to befriend Arrietty, her parents realize that they've been made, and knowing the two worlds can never meet, opt to pack up and leave before Arrietty's curiosity gets the best of them all. Meanwhile, they must contend with Sean's aunt, who has been trying to prove their existence for years, and is believed to be a bit off her rocker.

My favorite scenes were just watching the way the Borrowers navigated the human world. Arrietty's first Borrowing was a lot of fun, because we got to see the way they utilized strips of tape to scale tables, and old lost earrings as grappling hooks, and so on. I also really enjoyed the house cat. Ghibli always does great work when animating realistic animal behavior, and the cat has some really funny moments.

Though not my favorite of Studio Ghibli's films, Arrietty is still quite good. It drags on a little bit too long, but a lot of Hayao Miyazaki's films have a slower pace than American kids are used to. I think American kids and Japanese kids might have different attention spans. Or maybe the kids in our audience were just particularly squirmy.

I would recommend The Secret Life of Arrietty as a good movie for the whole family, though if your kid is impatient or the type that wants something noisier, you might want to just wait to show it to them on home video. Still, I don't have any kids, I just like movies. My wife and I saw it on our own and we both enjoyed it a great deal.

The Adventures of Tintin

I've already said much of what I had to say about how much I like the character of Tintin a couple of days ago in my review of Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, an old French adaptation of the character. In short: I'm a big fan. But even if I wasn't already a fan, I would have been pretty psyched for this new movie.

You see, The Adventures of Tintin's geek credibility is through the roof. It's directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson. The screenplay is credited to current Doctor Who/Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat, Shaun of the Dead/Scott Pilgrim writer/director Edgar Wright, and Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish. It features Daniel Craig, AKA James Bond as the villain, Andy Serkis, AKA Gollum as the sidekick, and Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the comic relief.

Holy crap!

The Adventures of Tintin is the story of boy reporter Tintin, who purchases a model ship at a market. Within the ship is a clue to hidden pirates' gold that leads him and his dog Snowy on a globetrotting adventure filled with peril and intrigue. Along the way, he gets help from dunderhead inspectors Thompson and Thomson and everybody's second favorite drunk seaman with an anger management problem (the first being Donald Duck, who must have been hitting the sauce, right?), Captain Haddock.

The movie was filmed using the performance capture method, where the actors' performances are fed into computers and then animated to look like the characters they're playing. These movies never seem to perform very well, mostly because of the often zombie-like rendered appearances of the characters. The technology has come a long way since Polar Express, though, and I have to say, it didn't really bother me this time around. There's no attempt in Tintin to make the characters look photo-real; rather, they're made to look like the human equivalent of creator Herge's art style.

Spielberg seems to be having a field day, letting his camera and imagination run wild. Positioning the camera in places that would otherwise be physically impossible in a live action film. The action centerpiece of the film is a huge, complex chase sequence done in a single shot. I'm not sure he captures Herge's spirit, exactly, but I think he manages to emphasize the stylistic and tonal qualities that the two of them have in common.

The cast all seem to be having fun as well, and are all perfect fits for their characters, particularly Jamie Bell in the title role. Pegg and Frost are quite impressive at making themselves indistinguishable from each other as the Thom(p)sons, especially considering how different they look in person. The dog, Snowy, is a purely CGI creation, but interacts perfectly with the actors, and perfectly captures the dog's personality from the comics. John Williams delivers a fun, upbeat score, that actually surprised me. In my mind, I expected it to be more along the lines of Indiana Jones, given the similar nature of the stories.

I'm honestly not sure if everyone will enjoy The Adventures of Tintin like I did. I have to admit, I was pretty inclined to like it from the get-go. I'm still not sure if America at large has any real reason to care about the character. Luckily for me, the rest of the world loves him, so a sequel is already on the way. Yay, Tintin!

Hugo

I'm not sure if a lot of fans out there were clamoring for a Martin Scorsese kids movie, but I know I was. About a decade ago, waaaay back when I was in college, there was an internet rumor that Scorsese was interested in directing the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This was years before the Tim Burton debacle that eventually happened. I just really like it when great directors known for more adult subject matter make movies for children, because they make them with the same degree of sophistication that they give any of their films.

Hugo is not only a wonderful, magical children's adventure set in 1920's Paris, it's also a loving ode to the dawn of cinema and the ability of movies to transport you into your dreams. Figuratively speaking, of course, we're not talking a Last Action Hero golden ticket scenario. It stars young Asa Butterfield in the title role, Hugo Cabret an orphaned son of a clockmaker who lives inside the walls of the train station in Paris, keeping the clocks running, unbeknownst to anyone. In his spare time, Hugo is trying to repair an old automaton that his father found at a museum, stealing parts from an old toymaker with a shop in the station. When Hugo is caught by the toymaker, his whole life is upturned, and he begins a journey, uncovering the toymaker's mysterious past while finding his own purpose in life in the process.

I'm not going to go into what Hugo discovers, and how it ties in with cinema, because that was all part of the magic of the movie. I loved how magical the movie felt, even though there was actually very few truly fantastical elements. Pretty much only the clockwork automaton.

The performances are all around wonderful. Asa Butterfield was great, as was Chloe Grace Moretz as the toymaker's God-daughter. Sacha Baron-Cohen continues to show his versatility and his prowess for physical comedy as the station's orphan hunting inspector. I wouldn't be surprised if Sir Ben Kingsley gets a Supporting Actor nomination for his part as Papa Georges, the toymaker.

I saw Hugo in 3-D, something I don't usually do. I was very curious to see how Scorsese utilized the 3-D technology as a tool. Unsurprisingly, it's among the best 3-D I've seen. But I learned something that I kind of already knew while watching it: As well done as it was, even the best 3-D doesn't look half as good as a 2-D movie. As deep and immersive as the experience was, I feel it would have been even more so in 2-D, without the darkened tint on the glasses and the eyestrain and the blur.

Hugo is based on a novel, called The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I suppose the studio that made the movie shortened the title in a desperate bid to make the title more memorable and hence more marketable. Or maybe they thought people would pronounce Cabret with a T instead of the French way. But in shortening it they drained all the magic and wonder from the title. Hugo gives the viewer no indication what they're going to see. Disney is doing the same thing with net year's John Carter (or JC as they like to shorten it). Hey Disney! The John Carter part isn't what interests us! It's the "OF MARS" part we want. Look at Hugo's opening weekend box office. Shortening the title didn't work.

Ok, enough ranting. Hugo is a movie that any film buff should go and see. Martin Scorsese clearly has put as much love and passion into it as anything he's ever done, if not more in some cases. I'm not sure if all kids would find it too interesting, but if you take the right kid to see it, you might just be setting them on a path to find their own love of cinema.

The Muppets

There are few things I love in this world more than The Muppets. Friends and family excluded, I rank the creations of Jim Henson up there with pretty much all of the greatest things in life. So it always saddened me a little when the property fell into disrepair and disuse for the better part of the last two decades. I've been hoping for a revitalization for, well, maybe half my life. I am proud to announce that Muppets are once again vital.

Writers Nick Stoller and Jason Segel, and director James Bobin bring a lifetime of love, passion, and enthusiasm to The Muppets. From the moment the first musical number begins, you can tell that Jason Segel (in the lead human role) is living a dream come true. Everyone involved in the movie appears to be having a blast, and giving it their all, and their joy is infectious.

The Muppets follows Gary (Segel) and his brother Walter. Walter has always been different. He stopped growing at age 7, he's small and fuzzy. He never knew how to relate to his world. That is, until the day he saw The Muppets on TV. From that day forth, he was The Muppets' biggest fan. When Gary and his girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams) are planning a trip to Hollywood for their 10th anniversary, they invite Walter along, so he can visit Muppet Studios.

Unfortunately, when they get there, the once glorious studio is now abandoned and decrepit, all of the locations in the tour are closed "for repair". Sneaking off into Kermit's old office, Walter overhears an evil oil millionaire (Chris Cooper) plans to tear down the studios and dig for oil there. Walter, Gary, and Mary decide that the only way they can save the studio is to reunite the Muppets and have them put on one last show.

What follows is what you would hope for in a Muppet movie. Endless gags and vaudevillian banter, big, moving musical numbers, celebrity cameos, and a hilarious and disarming self awareness that tells you that even the characters are aware that they are in a movie and that the narrative is bound by certain rules.

I loved the musical numbers. The new songs were written by Bret McKenzie of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords (whose show was co-created by Muppets director Bobin). They're clever, catchy, and silly in much the same fashion as the Conchords songs are. And the old songs are, well, there are a few old Muppet favorites in there, and I have to say, I teared up when they came on. Sorry I'm such a dork. I teared up a lot during the movie.

Bobin, Segel, and Stoller's love for the characters comes through, too. They give everybody a moment, including many of the more obscure characters that only geeks like me know the names of. They bumped up the role of Uncle Deadly, the cool looking dragon character usually only seen in brief Muppet Show gags, and gave him a little dimension for the first time. While Segel and Adams were welcome additions, I hope that now that we've been reintroduced to the Muppets, any possible future Muppet movies will be able to shift attention away from the human leads and back onto the Muppets where they belong. In the old movies, the humans were reserved for villain roles and cameos.

I enjoyed the movie a great deal, but it wasn't quite the same as Henson's Muppet movies. The energy was different. The difference was especially noticeable with Kermit. Steve Whitmire, the performer who operates Kermit, doesn't have Henson's distinctive hand acting. Obviously, he has his own. Kermit is still endlessly earnest and hopeful, but I kept waiting for him to have the frantic, frazzled energy that Kermit gets when he is trying to run his show, and keep everything from falling apart at any given moment while he's surrounded by so many loose cannons (figurative and literal cannons when Gonzo is around). That Kermit never arrives. Still, he was a good Kermit, it's just got to be tough under the shadow of Henson.

I am so happy that this group got The Muppets right. I want a whole new generation of children to see this movie for the first time and react to it the same way Walter and I did when we first encountered Kermit and the gang. There's still a month to go, but when all is said and done, I'm fairly positive The Muppets is going to be my favorite movie of the year. There just aren't enough movies with such unabashed joy and positivity out there anymore.

Real Steel

If there's one thing I strive to avoid in my life, it's cynicism. I don't always win, but I do my best. That's probably why about 95% of the reviews I write are positive. I tend to look for the good qualities in things, and it's generally pretty easy for me to overlook the bad.

When the first trailers came out for Shawn Levy's Real Steel, I thought it looked ridiculous. I never really stopped thinking that, but reviews started coming in that were saying it's better than it should be. And since I have a hard time saying no to robots, I decided to go check it out and hope for a fun movie.

Real Steel is in the near future where Robot Boxing is the sport of kings. Seriously, the near future. Like 8 years from now, human boxing is gone and Robot Boxing has taken over. Hugh Jackman is Charlie, a former boxer, now down-on-his- luck robot boxer, who, after an old flame dies, is saddled with her son. They find a robot in a junk yard and fix him up and take him to fights. The robot, Atom, rises through the ranks and eventually faces the world champion, who is, of course controlled by a couple of rich, corporate people who have lost touch with the more personal, home grown side of Robot Boxing(?). Do they win? Does it matter, as long as they all learn?

I didn't expect the story to be original, and I don't mind a formulaic story if it's well told. Real Steel takes a few elements from Rocky, a few from Over the Top. The antagonistic dynamic between Jackman and the kid is surely lifted from Paper Moon. Whatever, I didn't mind. What I did mind, however, was the fact that I did not like either of the lead characters one bit.

Jackman lost me in the first scene and never won me back. When we meet him, he's taking his old robot to a state fair or possibly a rodeo or something in Texas, where he's being paid to fight a bull. He's told it's an 800-pounder, but he's disappointed to find a much larger one in its place. So he fights the bull anyway. First it charges the robot and the robot flips it over. It gets back up and the robot socks the bull in the face. I don't care that the bull won the fight. When you introduce your hero by having him perform acts of animal cruelty with a 1000lb hunk of remote controlled steel, you lose me. I'm not a vegetarian or anything, but come on.

As the story progresses, he ditches out on the guys he owes money to, and goes to court to sign the son he wants nothing to do with over to his dead mom's sister. When the aunt's husband comes to him and asks him to keep the kid for the summer, he agrees to do it for $100,000 dollars. He sold the kid to these people. He's a horrible guy. Of course he comes to love the kid by the end, and he learns all sorts of wonderful lessons, but in my eye, too little, way too late.

As for the kid, he's a cocky little shit. I just don't like cocky kids. I have nothing against the actor, who did fine, but I really hated the character. My wife says it's just me, maybe it is. There's this scene where he grabs a microphone at a match and starts trash-talking and stuff. And the way he and Jackman argue and fight through the first half of the movie is just awful. I don't mind a tough kid character, but this didn't work at all.

Another problem I had with him is he's too smart for a kid. He knows everything about Robot Boxing before we meet him. Admittedly, if Robot Boxing existed, I might have at 11 too. Additionally, he speaks Japanese (from playing bootleg video games???) and is also apparently a genius robot programmer.

I know it's a kids movie. I'm trying to turn off the cynicism. But remember all those great Spielberg movies about ordinary kids put into extraordinary situations? Hey, remember Super 8 like 4 months ago? Why couldn't this kid be more like that? Hell, Spielberg executive produced this movie!

Another thing that bugged me is the complete lack of safety procedures these robot boxing leagues seem to have. I mean, the underground fight clubs are one thing, but even the professional ones have wide open rings with just chains around them, and the audience and fighters standing right next to it. These are half ton monsters built to destroy each other! You're going to let a KID near them? There are scenes where these robots limbs and heads go flying into the audience.

Now let's take a second to do some calculating here: According to the movie these robots weigh 1,000 pounds. So that's proportionately about, say, 6 times the weight of a human. And if the kid in Jerry Maguire taught me anything it's that the human head weighs 8 pounds. That means these robots have heads that weigh 48 pounds. And they fly into the audience, presumably crushing all who stand in their way! People must die at these matches every day!

So I guess that about sums it up. I really hoped Real Steel would win me over. Instead it lost me in the first scene and never won me back. Just give me someone to latch onto other than these jerks. I'd overlook all the logic problems and cliches if only I liked the characters.

Alakazam the Great (Boku No Son Goku)

This is one of those instances where Netflix really came through for me. It recommended this movie, of which I had no prior knowledge, but turns out contains a lot of my deepest interests.

The movie is Daisaku Shirakawa's "Boku No Son Goku", ridiculously titled Alakazam the Great in order to market to the American children of 50 years ago. One reason it is historically interesting is this is one of, if not the first, Japanese animations ever to be released in the states. It was dubbed by the same people who would later do Speed Racer, with Speed himself, Peter Fernandez, voicing the title character. This was before they actually translated what the characters were saying. The people didn't speak Japanese, they just watched the movie and adapted it based on what it looked like was happening. The studio that put it out also tacked on a couple of familiar voices, with Frankie Avalon as Alakazam's singing voice, Jonathan Winters, and the guy who did the voice of Winnie the Pooh narrating.

Another point of interest for me? It is an adaptation of Journey to the West, an ancient Chinese legend of Monkey, a clever, mischievous monkey on an action-packed pilgrimage to India. I've read the translated book of it, and it is one of the most fun books I've ever read. It has been adapted countless times in Asia, in all forms of media, and even a few times in the western world, most recently as a Chinese opera composed by Damon Albarn of The Gorillaz.



Sooo cool.

Now, this particular adaptation of Journey to the West is based on a Manga by the great Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, and considered the founding father of Japanese comics. I've been a huge fan of his works for some time now. I would hold him up to any of the great 20th century visual storytellers; Kubrick (who was also a fan), Kurosawa, Jack Kirby, etc. From what I've read, Tezuka's actual involvement in the movie was limited, but you can still see his influence in the character designs and the story itself.

The story goes as such: Alakazam (or just Monkey in the folklore) is a brash, mischievous little monkey who becomes king of his people. He's maybe not a very good king right away. When told that humans are the smartest of the animals, he seeks out Merlin (once again, an artifact of the translation) and tricks him into teaching him his magic. Once he learns this, he goes up and challenges the heavens, and is punished for his insolence by being trapped in a mountain. He is given a second chance by being allowed to act as bodyguard to Prince Amat (Tripitaka in the version I read) on his pilgrimage to India, in order to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China (this part isn't mentioned in the movie). On their way, they have many adventures (only a couple featured in the movie), and join up with a pig named Quigley (Pigsy in the version I read) and "Max Lulipopo" (known as Sandy in the book).

The movie holds up pretty well, and plays like the Japanese equivalent of a Disney fairy tale classic. The animation, especially, is very influenced by Disney. There are shades of Bambi in the animals, and the Chernobog sequence from Fantasia in some of the creatures. A really cool scene is when Alakazam goes to heaven and battles Hercules. They morph into various animals and duke it out, before ultimately becoming a dragon and a dinosaur. I have a 3 year old nephew who would love it. Alakazam is a great character, tricky in the tradition of Bugs Bunny, and kids will have an easy time liking him.

The voice work is your typical early anime dub, with the really fast talking and trying to fit the lines into the mouth movements. If you're familiar with how Speed Racer talked, it's like that. The movie was given a new, more western score, with songs very befitting of cartoons from 1960. I would be curious to hear what the songs were like in Japan. A lot of early anime (heck, even more recent stuff) was edited down for U.S. consumption, for time, or often for content. I couldn't tell if this was cut down at all. It felt pretty coherent, and there was nothing too violent, so I assume the length of the movie is pretty much intact.

The video quality on Netflix was pretty crappy; I assume there's probably not much money to be had in a DVD release of something like this, and a remastering was probably deemed not worth it by whatever studio owns the rights. Personally, I'd love to see a nice version of the movie in its original Japanese, and I'm sure a high quality DVD version of it exists over there that could easily be transferred to a stateside release. Just, you know, they don't want to spend the money.

If you love folklore and animation history like I do, or if you have younger kids and want to show them a fun story from another culture, look up Alakazam the Great on Netflix.

A Little Princess

Hey, wait a minute. A Little PRINCESS? This is a GIRLS movie! What am I doing reviewing a girls movie, you ask? Well, for starters, it's directed by the great Alphonso Cuaron. And for continuers, I have a five-year-old niece that I want to like me. And for finishers, my wife has been trying to get me to watch it for years.

So this perfect storm of circumstance has finally got me to watch A Little Princess, a movie I would never have otherwise thought to see. And you know what? It's a nice little movie.

A Little Princess is about a nice little girl, raised by her loving parents in India. She enjoys telling stories and is told that every little girl is a princess, no matter what their station in life. When her mother dies and her father goes off to fight in WWI, she is sent to a strict boarding house for little girls in New York City. There, she goes about telling her fantastical stories and spreading her princess philosophy to all the other nice little girls, and teaching little lessons to the not-so-nice ones. Then, tragedy strikes, and she is forced to learn the value of hardship and put her princesshood to a test.

Okay, that shouldn't very interesting to me, so I can't imagine that it is for you. But it is actually a very good film. Alfonso Cuaron knows how to make a good movie. Warner Bros. clearly thought they had something special on their hands that wasn't getting the exposure it deserved. The above poster is practically begging us to go see this movie. The cinematography is lovely and rich. There are some neat fantasy sequences showing us the stories the girl tells. They use mid-90's-era CGI, but they use it sparingly and it's very stylized, so the effects still hold up reasonably well.

Initially, I had hoped that my niece would let me interview her about the movie so I could put her thoughts into this review, but she got a sudden case of the shyness, so that put an end to that plan. I can say this, though: it held her attention all the way through, and that's quite a big thing. Also, while we were watching the movie, she would periodically turn to my wife and say, "I really like this movie". So there you have it, that's about as good a review as you can get.

In conclusion: If you are a five-to-ten-year-old girl, and you're reading this blog, you should probably check out Alfonso Cuaron's A Little Princess. If you are a 30-year-old man who likes things with samurai swords and puppets in them, you probably don't need to seek it out unless you

A: have a 5-to-10-year-old girl in your life; a daughter, a niece, an arranged bride, etc.

B: have a wife who loved the book as a kid and makes you watch it and you have no excuse after making her sit through MacGruber.

or

C: are a huuuuge fan of Alphonso Cuaron, and Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien just aren't doing it for you anymore.

If any of those are you, this movie will not hurt you, but you are in danger... of being charmed. (???)