Thirty Days of Disney Movies, Day Nineteen - Film That Made Me Cry the Hardest

Toy Story 3

I'll be blunt. If the ending doesn't make you cry, you have no soul.

The end.


Read my original review of Toy Story 3.

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Thirty Days of Disney Movies, Day Eighteen - Guilty Pleasure

On board the USS Cygnus, at the edge of The Black Hole

In the end, the bliss of watching The Black Hole is all about the wires.

Oh sure, you could point out the cheesy dialog--groan-inducing lines like "Some cause must have created all this, but what caused that cause?" or even "When you're nose to nose with a trash compactor, cool it"--but those are just minor contributions.

You could also talk about the ridiculous lapses of logic, even for a sci-fi film, like how after a meteorite crashes through the top of a spaceship in deep space, the inhabitants are still able to run to safety...and breathe.

Naaa, that's still not my favorite slice of cinematic cheese. It's definitely the wires.

Throughout The Black Hole, there are a bevy of humans and flying robots that float through the air in any given scene, and more than half the time you can see the wires holding them up. You could make a great drinking game out of it. See a wire, do a shot.

I'm not being critical. I think it's awesome.

Over the years, The Black Hole has grown on me because of how charmingly old school it is. It has very little of the digital trickery we take for granted in special effects movies these days--it was made in 1979, after all. Much of what you see on screen had to be done in-camera, although a lot of green screen background effects were filmed using over 150 matte shots of star fields, spaceship corridors and, of course, the black hole itself. It made for a fairly convincing celestial setting, even if it was offset by a pretty hokey script.

Strings attached: B.O.B. and V.I.N.CENT.

Disney made The Black Hole in response to the Star Wars phenomenon that began two years earlier. In some circles it was felt that George Lucas's hugely popular space opera was the type of movie Disney should have been producing for years instead of the benign family fare it kept churning out. It had been more than a decade since Disney was considered an innovator in the film industry or anywhere near the cutting edge, and its declining box office numbers proved it. The Black Hole was an opportunity for the studio to make a statement.

The statement fell flat. The story of a megalomaniac scientist (Maximilian Schell) obsessed with exploring the unknown void of a black hole wasn't the hit Disney hoped for. It cost $20 million to make and only raked in $25 million domestically at the box office. Those were respectable numbers for a Disney film back them, but still a money-loser by Hollywood standards. It didn't help that The Black Hole was released a few weeks after the opening of another splashy science fiction epic, Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

And yet...I just watched The Black Hole yesterday and was thoroughly entertained. I haven't seen the first Star Trek movie in years.

It's the wires, I tell you.

And V.I.N.CENT. the robot looking like R2D2 while sounding like C3PO.

And Yvette Mimieux wearing high heels in space and using ESP to communicate.

And Robert Forster not cracking a smile for 98 minutes.

And the bad guy robots standing stock still while the good guy humans shoot at them.

This is great stuff, seriously.

The 30-Day Disney Movie Challenge continues tomorrow, and there won't be a dry eye in the house.

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Thirty Days of Disney Movies, Day Seventeen - Least Favorite Book Adaptation

Taran comes to the aid of  the
sweet enchantress Eilonwy.

The Black Cauldron was not the worst movie Disney ever made, but it was darn close. It was certainly the studio's most legendary failure. The film languished in production for ten years, nearing completion in 1984 at the time when the company's leadership was in upheaval. Following a series of hostile takeover bids at Disney, Michael Eisner was named CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg was appointed head of the movie studio. One of Katzenberg's first orders of business was to check on the progress of The Black Cauldron. After previewing it, he was not impressed. His instructions to writer/producer Joe Hale were succinct.

"It's bad. Fix it."

Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew and then head of animation, admitted he didn't understand what the story was about. Even the company's own animators were split over it. Some saw the dark and violent (it was the first Disney animated film to earn a PG rating) sword and sorcery epic as the perfect vehicle to give Disney back its long lost edge in animation. Others felt it was a poor project choice that didn't mesh with the Disney brand.

The doubters were right. After its summer 1985 release, The Black Cauldron grossed a mere $22 million at the box office, significantly less than what it cost to make. Adding insult to injury, it was out-earned that year by the non-Disney The Care Bears Movie. Even Disney's re-release of 101 Dalmatians at Christmas did better than The Black Cauldron, selling $33 million in tickets.

Despite its failings, the movie had a noble pedigree. It was based on the popular Newberry Award-winning series of books, The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander. In the film, a young pig keeper named Taran must protect his prized pig, Hen Wen, from the evil clutches of the Horned King. Hen Wen has clairvoyant powers that the King needs to help locate the mystical Black Cauldron, which can be used to raise an invincible army of the undead. Needless to say, Horned King + Undead Army = Bad. When Hen Wen is captured, it's up to Taran and a ragtag group of friends to rescue her, defeat the Horned King and destroy the cauldron.

Taran and Gurgi

What sounded good on paper, though, lost a lot during its execution. Despite some very attractive animation (shot in widescreen 70mm) The Black Cauldron is a mess of storytelling. It is, in turns, both dull and confusing with characters that lack charisma and a story that never really grabs your attention--except when it leaves you scratching your head (What do the pixie-ish Fairfolk do, anyway?). The movie's lone saving grace is a hyper-cute fur ball of a creature named Gurgi (voiced ever-so-sweetly by John Byner), who wants only to be Taran's friend and steal his food. That Gurgi ultimately becomes a hero is the film's sole touching moment, but it's lost in the muddle of understanding what's going on (How, exactly, were the Horned King and the cauldron destroyed? They were destroyed, right?).

The Black Cauldron was meant to resurrect Disney animation. Instead, it almost brought it crashing down.

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