I had a similar, more informal movie project where I worked my way through all of Disney’s animated features, with a kind of backseat goal of lifting off the nostalgia goggles for some of these films I hadn’t seen since I was a child, and for being able to put the films in a kind of rough context for studio as a whole. I could probably dedicate a whole separate blog to the various observations that came out of doing that, but one of the things that really stuck with me was the relationship between and perception of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi; the latter, I felt, was the high point of the studio artistically at the time, balancing the abstract imagery and impressionism in Fantasia against the more fable-like qualities of their other films to create something that often felt more like a moving painting than a long cartoon… but it’s the former that gets the lion’s share of the credit for breaking new ground in animation. Snow White does have a lot of big achievements, but the majority of them are more technical milestones (the length, the realism of human movement, the multiplane camera); the film itself is pretty plain. Yet the legacy of Snow White is being the rock on which Disney built all their subsequent animated features upon, while Bambi is often relegated to a footnote about traumatising generations of children with imagery of parental death. How much weight should being the first to do something factor in to a judgement of its quality? Do you give more credit to those who created the concept, or those who refined it?
The Kid is another film of firsts – Charlie Chaplin‘s first feature-length film and the first blend of the then-strict genres of comedy and drama. The plot involves the Little Tramp (Chaplin) accidentally becoming the guardian of a baby, and raising him as his son. The slapstick humour is precise and the sequences are fairly inventive, but it’s still slapstick humour. There are a lot of good scenes that show a real bond between the Little Tramp and the kid (Jackie Coogan), but most of them coast on having a cute child in an adorable little urchin outfit; it’s the same kind of deep emotional connection one experiences when watching a clip of a sleepy puppy on YouTube. The first whatever is always a big deal in terms of history, but as for the actual experience, The Kid still felt a little raw.
(Also, the dream sequence? What the hell? The relationship between the dream and what was happening was tenuous at best, it’s completely out of step with the tone of the rest of the film, and then right after it the film races right to the end. I understand how much of a novelty film still was in the 20s, but why aren’t modern audiences more critical of this whole reel of non-sequitor?)
sarcasmbeast 