Reviews by JxSxPx

Whereas 1966’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a model of pacing and narrative economy in adapting a piece of children’s literature, Horton Hears a Who is a slightly bloated affair. Too many songs slow things down, and perhaps there just wasn’t enough story here to justify a full twenty-five minute special. Still, it’s Chuck Jones adapting Dr. Seuss and that by definition already has quite a bit going for it.

Mainly the sweetness and gentleness of Horton is quite pleasing as a hero. He’s a kind soul, trying to do what’s right while the entire jungle gossips and ostracizes him. Hans Conried goes uncommonly gentle in giving him life. Conried was typically called upon to give blustery life to over-the-top villains, like the melodramatic Captain Hook or the Mathemagician. Jones also indulges in his cutesy tendencies here, giving Horton large, soft eyes complete with long eyelashes and a rounded body held atop wonky knees.

And the pleasing angularity of several of the characters and backgrounds works well to contrast against Horton’s curvature. Jane Kangaroo, the primary antagonist, is particularly smart as a character design. Haughty, imperious and borderline fascist in her beliefs, Jane leers at Horton’s “odd” behavior, turning the entire jungle against him. June Foray finds a cinched, tough vocal cadence; rounded tones and clipped phrases abound, to give Jane a preening, queenly villainy.

It’s bright and colorful, and perhaps if you’re young enough the heavy messaging will be easily forgiven, but Horton’s lack of subtlety with its imparting is exhausting. Once the narrative starts rolling it never ceases to remind of us of its moral, rolling out “a person is a person, no matter how small” every few minutes.

By design there must be a happy ending, but the about-face of the jungle denizens in Horton is quite shocking. They go from planning to boil the flower, caging Horton, and threatening him to softening, marveling at how Horton was right all along, and then parading off into the sunset. The tonal whiplash is astounding and nowhere near as earned as the Grinch’s, who had an entire act based around his redemption and not mere seconds.

Horton Hears a Who is still far better than many of the live action atrocities and CGI animations that take Dr. Seuss’ work as a springboard for post-modern deconstruction. This one is the obvious weaker piece between the two Jones made, and probably would have been better served as an animated short. I can’t say it’s bad, because it’s not, but it is frustratingly sloppy.

This is twenty-five minutes of absolute perfection. A hugely successful artistic marriage between the adapter and source material, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is as much of a mighty, towering classic as the beloved Dr. Seuss book.

For me, this is perennial viewing. Christmas is never quite complete without a few viewing experiences every year – A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and this, which may be my favorite of the lot. Jones and Seuss merge beautifully, balancing out the weirdness and idiosyncrasies in each other’s work to create something vital and wonderfully alive.

No offense to Ron Howard’s 2000 live action version, but this is the only one you’ll ever need to watch. It’s a model of absolute economy, moving through the story with a fantastic balance of pacing, merging in moments of humor, darkness, song, and joyous uplift in a bite sized chunk.

Even better is the sense of enthusiasm and love for the source material that radiates throughout the special. Jones clearly finds a kindred spirit in Seuss’ topsy-turvy, angular world. Whoville is free of straight lines, made up entirely of curves, sharply jutting out corners, and rolling hills and valleys. The basic framework allowed Jones to really go crazy with the whacky character movements and designs, creating smart, unique choices like the Grinch’s eyes hauntingly peering out of a chimney or the montage of Whos running around putting up decorations with a large assortment of gadgets and gizmos.

But would How the Grinch Stole Christmas be quite as memorable without the vocal intonations of Boris Karloff? He gravels his voice for the Grinch, reaching back into his Universal Monsters days to bring weight and menace to the role, and narrates with his naturally soft, lilting speech, finding the humor and warmth in the text in his delicate tones. I’ll fight anyone who disagrees with me on this, but I find his work here to be among the greatest of his career.

Matching him in virtuoso vocal delivery is Thurl Ravenscroft’s booming bass voice singing, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” Ravenscroft delivers the series of jokes and verbal put-downs like a great radio ham. He knows this is faintly ridiculous material, but he delivers it like it’s a piece of the great American songbook. In fact, it would be easy to imagine Karloff and Ravenscroft delivering this as a radio play, and achieving the same delirious heights on the listener without the vibrant animation and colors to go along with it.

It’s a merger of many great talents on a top-shelf project, and we were blessed with a masterpiece. I’ve loved this special for my entire life, and the older the I get the more I appreciate its combination of vibrancy, quirk, and hint of darkness before delivering the heartwarming and uplifting final bow. I said it earlier, and I’ll say it again, this is perfection.

Here’s an underrated and barely known quantity in Chuck Jones’ career. His lone feature-length film, The Phantom Tollbooth is his second dip into Norton Juster’s work, but with less explosive results than the adventurous “The Dot and the Line.” It’s still a very enjoyable and enjoyably strange effort, but there’s the persistent feeling that something is missing here.

Normally any film withheld for release for a prolonged period is a red flag that it’s a turkey. Like, an immediate one with no possible other interpretation than the studio saw the finished product and knew it had something questionable on their hands. The Phantom Tollbooth is an exception that proves the rule for a majority of its running time, even if some spots are sluggish and a certain amount of verbal wordplay and wit is buried beneath a series of visual jokes.

Perhaps another problem with The Phantom Tollbooth is a two-headed flaw, one that lingers over many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is both an insistence on teaching moral lessons in a loop story of word play and gleeful mischief, and a flabbiness that settles in when you realize the story is merely a series of odd sketches strung together. In fact, The Phantom Tollbooth frequently plays like an agnate variation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Even if The Phantom Tollbooth does give off a vibe of déjà vu, at least it allows for Jones to create a series of wonderfully strange and experimental images. The fact that it was originally completed in 1968 hints at what the images will look like. Yes, much like Yellow Submarine and the general weirdness of Saturday morning cartoons of the era, a certain hallucinatory quality pervades the images. By the time it was released in 1970, a mere two years but an eternity in pop culture, this played like a looser, smarter, kookier rebuttal to Disney’s dominating animated features of the era. (Although, much like Disney films of this era, things would only have improved with the removal of the unnecessary songs that slam things to a halt.)

Even better is the solid cast that Jones has assembled for this. Mainstays like Mel Blanc, Les Tremayne, and June Foray are present and accounted for. The appearances of Hans Conried (best known for voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan), Candy Candido, and Daws Butler (the voice of Hanna-Barbera cartoons) do solid work in their typically quirky and nutty character parts. None of The Phantom Tollbooth would work effectively without Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster himself) giving credible life to a bored little boy looking for adventure.

If the final product is a bit messy, at least The Phantom Tollbooth is a film overflowing with ideas and imagination. It is well worth seeking out as it combines a zesty, poppy vibe with more sophisticated humor into something delightfully odd. It is a solid piece of work, but a few nips and tucks here and there had the potential to push into the realm of unheralded, underappreciated near classic.

Despite growing up during the 80s resurgence of the Chipmunks, I was never much of a fan of their helium voiced harmonies and sitcom-level shenanigans. I didn’t hate them (I still don’t, although I don’t recognize the grotesqueries they’ve been turned into by the modern live-action films), but re-visiting them here I felt a sense of beguiling innocence. The narrative stakes are low, Alvin is sweetly naughty, Dave is grumpy and ruffled throughout, and the creative team works in harmony to achieve a solid effort.

Perhaps it’s that Ross Bagdasarian Jr. had such a strong presence behind the scenes that this special feels like much of the older Chipmunks work. The look and sounds of the original works from late-50s marry to Chuck Jones’ style very well, and Jones’ gentler side comes out in full force.

Christmas specials can sustain a certain amount of schmaltz, and A Chipmunk Christmas piles it on thick with the running plot about a sick boy who is only cured when Alvin gives him his gold harmonica. But I’d be a liar if I tried to proclaim that the sappy, happy ending didn’t earn a smile from me. Maybe I’m just a soft touch underneath the layers of sarcasm and cynicism.

It doesn’t hurt that A Chipmunk Christmas looks quite pleasing to the eye, with Jones’ quirky character designs being appropriately bouncy and mobile, and Toby Bluth’s backgrounds being warm, inviting creations. The soundtrack is also quite strong, with a pleasant mixture of secular and religious songs, and an appearance from “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” in a scene mimicking the original recording.

None of this is to say that it holds its own against titanic holiday specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, or loads of the Rankin/Bass Productions offerings. Put this next to any of those, and it’s slightness becomes an obvious weakness as its limited plotting is good enough for a brisk thirty minutes, but ultimately forgettable.

A Chipmunk Christmas is still an overall success. Obviously, as its solid ratings and warm reception lead to the long-running Saturday morning cartoon, Alvin and the Chipmunks. (If you’re a child of the 80s, that theme song just popped into your head, sorry.) Nostalgia may be clouding my vision, but there was something endearing and charming about how simplistic this thing was. It’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend thirty minutes once a year, and sometimes that’s good enough.

The creative tension and falling out between comic strip creator Walt Kelly and Chuck Jones mares The Pogo Special Birthday Special. It’s like listening to an orchestra playing while being ever-so-slightly off key the entire time. The individual pieces are all there, but they’re just not assembled correctly to make a pleasing overall effect.

The backgrounds are lively and colorful, the character models are appealing, and there’s a few good verbal jokes, but the pacing is all over the place, and at times it drifts too far over into either Kelly or Jones territory to congeal as a coherent collaboration. There’s also the general problem of something so southern in nature given life by people clearly unfamiliar with the sounds and vibes of the area, as too many of the voices sound like goofy riffs on dialects instead of cohesive character voices.

Jones’ trademark wit is gone, and the entire thing is too cutesy for words. Something went wrong, or the major fight between the two of them caused the rest of the production to rush out a finished product. Not the worst thing Jones attached his name to (check the Raggedy Ann and Andy Christmas special), but it is disappointingly shapeless.  

Even by the already lax standards of a musical, the narrative of Stormy Weather is a wispy thing. A mere formality to string together a series of revue numbers from an all-black group of entertainers. Don’t come around here if you want typical dramatic stakes like character arcs, emotional development, or plot twists, but this normally serious hindrance wilts in the sheer power of the ensemble of strong performers here.

I am certain that Stormy Weather would only improve in estimation if the narrative wraparound, telling the love story of Bill Williamson and Selina Rogers, was jettisoned in favor of just going straight ahead as a filmed musical revue. Luckily, someone in production noticed this, and the amount of time between musical numbers is severely limited to just a few moments of talking before we’re watching Lena Horne sing, Bill Robinson dance, or any number of specialty acts strut their stuff.

Thunderstruck is the best descriptor I can find for the moments in which the performers are allowed to shine. Bill Robinson does a tap dance across a series of tribal drums, keeping the rhythm going all by himself in a few spots, and it’s audacious and exuberant in how controlled and energetic he is in his tremendous gifts. It’s painful to go back and watch him play second fiddle to Shirley Temple after seeing what happens when he’s in complete control of a dance number.

The first time I watched Stormy Weather, right after taking in Cabin in the Sky, I was annoyed by this film’s lack of a strong narrative structure, that this story was generic to the point of anemic. On a second viewing, and after having taken in several revue films, I appreciate it much more. Who needs a story when you’ve got the lovely fantasy world of this film to escape in? I don’t, especially if it means stringing together dynamite sequences involving Ada Brown, the Nicholas Brothers, Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra, and Fats Waller.

Even better is how Stormy Weather seems to track the evolution of black entertainment. From the bluesy earlier days to the more lavish spectacles as the film wraps up, Stormy Weather is a glorious piece of spectacle. A collage of song-and-dance-and-comedy would be a better sound bite for it, but that doesn’t mean Stormy Weather is without the prevailing attitudes of the time. There are a few moments that walk right up to the edge of minstrel show, and these moments, while few, do occasionally provide a cringe in-between all of the joy emanating from the screen.  

But it’s hard to hold any faults against in the film in the face of moments as strong as Ada Brown belting out a number in a juke joint. The Nicholas Brothers perform one of the greatest dance sequences in the history of the medium with “Jumping Jive.” It’s athletic and seemingly inhuman how they consistently jump, leap, tumble, and skip over and under each other and then smoothly transition back in anarchic, jubilant dancing. Fats Waller pounds out “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on the piano, and you wonder how they snuck this one past the censors with its naughty lyrics.

While Cab Calloway gets several appearances, and his zoot suit and scat singing is yet another moment of pure adrenaline performing. If there’s one thing Stormy Weather is no lacking for, it’s high-energy performances as it packs in 20 moments like this in a mere 78 minutes. Katharine Dunham and her dance troupe make an appearance, and they perform a beautiful, melancholic dance set to the title tune. This leads me to praising, as if it hasn’t been enough, Lena Horne’s rendition of the title song. Wearing a glamorous dress, filled with heartache and a gentle quiver in her voice, she leans against a wall and belts it out with the impression that her entire life depends upon this one moment. Throughout Horne is a earthy, charming, graceful, and sexy presence.

Added to the National Film Registry in 2001, Stormy Weather is an important film for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is the historical importance, being one of only two major studio releases during the era comprised of an entirely black cast. Another is how it allows them to star as movers and shakers entirely throughout their world, with the businesses and theatrical troupes, orchestras, dance companies and army troops all being owned and populated by black people. Yet another reason is how every single one of these performers brought their best to the film, and all you’ll want to know is where so many of them were hidden during the era. This is why Stormy Weather endures, and why it remains a vital and essential film from the studio era.

The narrative stakes in these Raggedy Ann and Andy specials are just bizarre. Strange things in which they are impossibly low, but lacking in a certain sparkle of interest that you begin to pay closer attention to the fact that none of it makes sense. And that’s taking into account that you’ve agreed to watch a cartoon about two sentient rag dolls with a rag doll dog that does extreme sports.

Frankly, I’d rather spend thirty minutes watching Raggedy Arthur skateboard across the time warped village while interacting with the emotionally hysteric pumpkin of the title. At least the pumpkin has a personality more interesting and prone to dramatic overreactions that put the anemic characteristics of the leads in a harsher light. Look, the pumpkin crying seeds and acting like his fate is worse than death amused me. That’s really all I ask for in these things.

So The Pumpkin Who Couldn’t Smile is a step up from The Great Santa Claus Caper, but only a minor one. There’s still the problem of the narrative just not being terribly interesting enough to handle a full thirty minutes (ok, so it’s actually about twenty-two when you remove the commercials). The rag doll siblings notice an unhappy little boy who lives with his cold spinster aunt, so they decide that he needs a pumpkin to restore the spirit of the Halloween season. I don’t get it either, but we get a melodramatic pumpkin riding across town on a skateboard to the complete bewilderment of the townspeople.

If The Great Santa Claus Caper looked more Chuck Jones than Johnny Gruelle, then The Pumpkin Who Couldn’t Smile jettisons the final vestiges of Gruelle’s work for more of Jones. Aunt Agatha looks like any of the older granny characters in a Tweety Bird cartoon, and the pumpkin is all Jones’ trademark angularity and rubbery movements. And I would be lying if I said Jones didn’t manage to wring the slightest bit of empathy for me during the emotional uplift ending. It was minor, but it was there. Or I’m just a big softie at heart, either way it worked.

It’s a bit hard to review this mess as there’s not much there to speak about. The plot makes zero sense, even going by the wide margins of which we accommodate Christmas specials tied to merchandised characters, and the whole thing consists of only a handful of scenes with little in the way of wit or creativity that sparkles in the best of Chuck Jones’ work.

Raggedy Ann and Andy in The Great Santa Claus Caper begins with a breaking of the fourth-wall by a Wil E. Coyote dollar store knockoff, Comet the reindeer overhearing his ramblings, and deciding that the best backup for this mission are a pair of rag doll siblings. It’s idiotic and muddled from the outset, with nothing truly at risk here. Jones did better work tackling the behemoth of Christmas and its emotional meanings years earlier, and subsequent dips into the same well turned up increasingly drier.

At least the gentleness and quietness of Johnny Gruelle’s work was translated for this, but that also means that there’s nothing much to keep your interest. Our big bad wolf wants encase Christmas presents in thick plastic, turn around and force kids to buy the solvent for it, and make them buy their Christmas presents. Comet is horrified, scoops up the rag doll duo plus their rag doll pooch, and jets them back to the North Pole where they talk the big bad wolf into being good? Then have a Peter Pan stage show moment where they ask the children watching to scream along with them? Look, it’s weird and obtuse.

Some of my aversion to this could be that I never “got” the appeal of Raggedy Ann and Andy. There’s just not much dramatic potential there with these characters. They’re so impassive and nondescript that Jones has to inject some borrowed lunacy from his more famous creations to liven things up, and that only goes so far. The Great Santa Claus Caper is justifiably forgotten and regulated to a mere curiosity in the collected works of Chuck Jones.

Lilting is best in the quiet moments, of which there are many, where we patiently observe character interactions and how they’re processing their grief. It’s delicate and quiet, carefully choosing what needs to be communicated aloud and what shall remain subterranean. At times, this choice makes the film feel standoffish; removing us from a few of the uglier instances of human emotion, but it mostly lays bare the disorientating nature of loss and rebalancing your life in the aftermath.

The major problem with Lilting is a great premise that feels far too one sided, and inevitably spins its wheels a bit towards the end, but there’s enough quietly devastating scenes and strong acting to bandage over these problems. Ben Whishaw is one of our finest actors currently working, full of subtle facial work, and a deep vulnerability, which can give the impression of an emotional brittleness when used effectively. Lilting doesn’t give him enough to do, forcing his character to the sidelines too often, essentially making his grief a brief sketch despite an equally crippling sense of loss and isolation.

I’d have easily traded all of the scenes with Peter Bowles for more scenes depicting Whishaw’s character and the dead lover at the heart of the film (Andrew Leung). Bowles’ salty romantic interest for Junn (Cheng Pei Pei), the mother of the deceased and central focus of the film, feel tonally contrasted from the rest of the piece, and proves more of a distraction than anything else. Leung’s character becomes a cipher with the truth of his personality presence entirely unknown, as there is no “there” to his character. It becomes hard to invest in the struggle and dynamic between the mother and her son’s lover if the person they’re fighting about and trying to heal over is but the faintest impression.

None of this makes Lilting a bad movie, on the contrary it’s so close to greatness that these fumbles strangely make you root for it more, as everything else works like gangbusters. Whishaw and the company of actors sell the improbability of some of the script with panache, and Cheng Pei Pei matches him with a combination of stubbornness and an ache that rests in her soul from a hard life in a foreign land. In their all too brief scenes together, Whishaw and Leung create a believably lived in romance, full of jokes, supportive glances, and exasperated fights.

The glacial pace actually doesn’t bother me, as I found it to be appropriate to the material. Processing grief and finding a new normal is not a quick process for anyone, and especially not for a mother and partner of several years. No gauche sarcasm to be found here, just an appealing heart-on-sleeve openness that is quite fetching in its vulnerability and sincerity, two qualities that are sorely lacking in modern cinematic language. Watching Whishaw in just about anything is worth the price of admission alone, and Lilting is best when it points the camera at him and just lingers as quicksilver thoughts flash across his fine features and large eyes.   

For his final dip into Kipling’s work, Jones decided to tackle the biggest character, and the first story, in The Jungle Book, Mowgli. Nothing against Disney’s film version, but Jones’ television specials are the clearly superior versions. There’s no need to describe the story, as you’re already familiar with it from any of the numerous incarnations of the tale, but Jones’ version sticks closest to the text, restoring characters and relationships to their rightful places after Disney’s mutations of them.

Jones’ love for the source material bristles throughout his three Kipling shorts. Perhaps it’s how pliable they were to the animated form, allowing Jones to explore and expand what a children’s cartoon could look and feel like. It’s certainly true that Mowgli’s Brothers displays an artistic maturity that several other cartoons of its type don’t.

This version enchants me from the opening credits straight through, where Shere Khan is made up of black triangles stalking across a hot pink background, to the end, where Mowgli tries to return to the man village. If the backgrounds in The White Seal were abstract, then the ones here are the vaguest of impressions. An angular jungle of jagged shapes and rounded figures that looks more like the impressions and imaginings of a bright child than a typical cartoon.

June Foray and Roddy McDowell return to vocal duties, and Foray is particularly warm and maternal here. McDowell gets the bulk of the work here, and he gives a full array of vocal styles to the various characters and a clipped, posh accent for his moments of narration. Much like Welles in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, McDowell wraps his delicious vocal intonations around Kipling’s text with aplomb.

The poetry of Kipling is brought to life by Jones in Mowgli’s Brothers, both in the narration and in the experimentation of the piece. Taken individually, any of the adaptations are beautifully crafted wonders, but taken all together they’re something even greater. Each with a unique look and tone, each possessing individual strengths, they form an array of colors and sounds that push the boundaries of what American animation can be and look like. But how many people still watch them? I feel as if they’re criminally underrated and overdue for a reappraisal and place of prominence in Jones’ work.