Film Snark

Belle, a white young woman with brown hair and a blue hair bow, wearing a blue dress with a white collared undershirt reaches towards a glass jar placed on a table. Inside the jar, a glowing pink rose is floating, and several petals have dropped to the table.
A-
Disney Animated Features

Beauty and the Beast
Released: September 29th, 1991

I love Belle and the animated furniture is charming. I liked this a lot more when I was a kid.

This is a fun movie, obviously. The music is iconic, and Belle is a great character. She's headstrong and she reads and she's smart, and she is kind. I don't buy into the Stockholm Syndrome theory as much as I used to; I still think it would be better to show forgiveness and change if the beast, you know, actually TALKED about how locking Belle up was wrong in the first place. He never really atones for his bad behavior, he just stops doing it and becomes emo.

Notable Grossness

stigmatization of mental illness, a couple of "stupid"s

There are a lot of really great moments in this; "Be Our Guest", any time Lumière and Cogsworth are on screen, Angela Lansbury singing "Tale As Old As Time" (even if I'm not really crazy about the lyrics). "GO AHEAD AND STARVE". "If it's not Baroque, don't fix it!", Belle putting the scarf over her head while being sarcastic about marrying Gaston, and then kicking the tabletop off the barrel. It's little moments like this (and NUMEROUS moments in the opening two scenes - the stained glass intro and Belle singing about the provincial life) that make this movie more than just good. It has depth to it.

I care about Belle, the Beast, and Maurice, but I care about the secondary characters much less in this movie (okay except Cogsworth, who's my fussy, bossy boyfriend). Gaston and LeFou are iconically funny but I don't...........care? I dunno, it's hard to explain.

One of my favorite animation bits is Belle's skirt while they're dancing. It's not just a bell-shape swinging back and forth; it swirls in a way that I always remember wanting my skirts to swirl. Even my short skirts now that are circle skirts, I twist in them and get them to swirl around me like that. It's one of my favorite parts. Also obviously there are loads of other good bits of animation; the entirety of "Be Our Guest" and the ballroom scene specifically. For the most part I rarely felt like there were "lazy" bits of animation in this, except the end of Gaston's song when everyone's behaving very oddly so that the animation isn't so complicated.

Anyway, I like this movie a lot. But I'd reach for others before this one.

June 29th, 2021
Pete's Dragon
A movie release poster shows a group of white people, 4 men, a woman, and a young boy, surrounding a green animated dragon with pink wings and red hair. The poster says "Coming at Christmas, Walt Disney Productions' Pete's Dragon"
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Five human actors, a woman, a man, and three children of various ages, sit on a flying brass bed with a floral blanket, with the moon and clouds behind them. Below them, illustrated animals are in various poses: two fish dance together (one in a suit); two fish and an octopus play in a band together with the words "The Briny Boys" on the front of the drum kit; an alligator, a rhino, and a gorilla run around a soccer field in yellow and green athletic outfits; a lion in a crown and red royal robe stands with one foot on the soccer ball; and a secretary bird in a suit with glasses stands watching.

Recent Snark

Bert, a chimney sweep, Jane, a young blonde child in a red dress and yellow overcoat, Michael, a young strawberry blonde child in short pants and a button coat, and Mary Poppins, a nanny in a red dress with a black hat with white flowers, stand on a rooftop, covered in soot.

Mary Poppins

Julie Andrews is a genuine delight, whether she's being fun or she's irritated. It's not just her voice, her whole presence is just delightful. George and Winifred Banks are excellent side characters, and the kids are as adorable as they need to be. Dick Van Dyke is a national treasure and I won't hear a word against him.

Structurally, there's not really a plot, but that makes sense given that it's based on a series of kind of episodic books. It's also very long. I think the length and episodic nature takes away from the character study of stuffy, cross Mr. Banks and how he learns from his children (and Mary Poppins and Bert) how to retain a sense of wonder and joy. But it's consistently fun. The music is delightful, the dancing is wonderful, and the adventures Mary Poppins and Bert and the kids go on are spectacular. I'm sure I have nostalgia for it but I think this stands up, to be honest.

The dings on the grade are for occasional bad costumes, bad makeup, the length, the imperialist nonsense. I'm honestly tempted to raise it back up because of the flawless animation/live action melding.

September 13th, 2022
Bigfoot, a giant humanoid creature with red fur, sits in front of a cardboard box with a downward pointing arrow on the side, wearing a pair of white men's briefs underwear on his head. He holds the crotch hole open with his fingers so he can look out. Goofy, a dog-like humanoid cartoon with black skin and a pale face, and long ears, watches from his yellow car several hundred feet behind Bigfoot, with his son Max in the passenger seat; Max looks similar to Goofy.

A Goofy Movie

I know this is shameful for someone my age but I've never seen this movie before. I may have caught bits of it when my brothers were younger, but the only thing I remember is Pauly Shore doing the leaning tower of cheese-a. I'm pretty much going into this one blind.

March 1st, 2022