kids

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

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It’s been over eight years since I first saw Something Wicked This Way Comes, the 1983 Disney Pictures adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, when we covered it for “Movie of the Month” in July of 2017. In looking back over what I wrote, it seems that at the time I was most interested in communicating how the film differed from the novel and allowing my cohort to get more into the meat of what the film meant to them. In that discussion, there’s mention of the fact that this film works best on VHS, but I recently got to see the digital, full screen version that was just added to streaming at the beginning of this month, and it was virtually a brand-new experience for me. I’m not sure if it was because the tape I had was substandard or I was suffering with some kind of mind-numbing flu at the time of my initial viewing, but this felt like a brand new movie to me, as if I had never seen it before, and I felt the need to revisit it in writing as well. 

I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an “80s kid horror syllabus” lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it. The film is told from the point of view of an adult Will Halloway, about the final days leading up to his fourteenth birthday on Halloween, sometime in the 1950s. The young Will (Vidal Peterson) tells us early on that this is really the story of his father, Charles (Jason Robards), and the way that his father saved Will and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) from a dark and mysterious force that appeared in their small midwestern town of Green Town. This evil is mostly represented in the forms of carnival proprietor Mr. Dark (a delightfully malevolent Jonathan Pryce), his brutal right hand man Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fisher), and the enigmatic “dust witch” (Pam Grier) who charms men to their doom. 

I mentioned it way back when, but Something Wicked (the novel) undoubtedly had an effect on Stephen King’s Needful Things, so much so that the latter work bears as much similarity to this film as, say, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass does to King’s own work. What I was struck by on this watch was how much it must have also influenced IT, given that the narratives both revolve around young children on the cusp of adolescence who resist the machinations of an intangible force of evil to which adults are blind (or blinded). The difference is that in IT, Pennywise seeks to consume the fear of children because their fears are much more concrete than those of adults and thus are something it can manifest while its supernatural powers make it nearly imperceptible to adults while, in Something Wicked, Mr. Dark’s mystical offers to the adults of Green Town are specifically aimed at the regrets that age has wrought on them. It’s telling that his offers are mostly lost on Will, a boy with two loving parents (even if his father is in poor health) and who has experienced only one traumatic event, while Jim, a boy living with a single mother because his father disappeared years ago and who can’t wait to grow up, is much more susceptible to Dark’s machinations. Jim and Will represent the two sides of fantasy; while Will still has the childlike imagination that inspires play, Jim’s daydreaming is maladaptive and, thus, makes him more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by Dark (and darkness). 

In that above-linked “Movie of the Month” discussion, there was a general consensus that Mr. Dark and his legion were preying upon people’s selfishness, but I see something different in it now. For some, their temptation may be related to something that we could call weakness—Miss Foley, once the town’s greatest beauty and now an old spinster, desires her youthful grace vainly; Mr. Tetley the cigar-peddler has piddled away his money on lottery tickets greedily; Mr. Crosetti the barber desires the company of a woman as apparently the only single man in a town of married women lasciviously (although I think the last of these is arguable). But I think maybe we were all operating under our own youthful blindness back then, because we failed to identify that what Dark was offering wasn’t the opportunity to indulge in a variety of selfish, carnal desires but to overturn the regrets of the past. This is made most manifest in two characters: Mr. Halloway (naturally, as the main character), but more blatantly in the form of the town’s bartender, Ed, played by real life amputee James Stacy. Ed is a strange figure, as he still wears his old football jersey around the town and can’t stop talking about the good old days, and if he were still an able-bodied man, we would pity him for being the kind of guy who peaked in high school and never shuts up about it. As it is, since he has lost an arm and a leg, we are sympathetic both to his fond remembrances of the past as well as the ease with which he is seduced by Dark’s promise of making him “whole” again. This reveals that there’s more than mere selfishness (or vanity, greed, or lust) at the heart of Dark’s bargains, but the false promise of a life without regret, and sets up the offer that he makes to Mr. Halloway. 

This is a wonderfully clever bit of narrative misdirection. Mr. Halloway’s greatest regret isn’t that he’s not wealthier or younger, but that his being a relatively older father and thus not being strong enough to save Will when he was swept up in a current at a riverside picnic means that he failed his son. Halloway’s regret lives outside of him; it’s in the way that his son panics and tries to run from the adult conversation about what happened that day at the river. Dark can only perceive that Halloway desires to be young and strong again, and his offer to return his youth to him fails not just because Halloway isn’t calloused and heartless enough to give up his child for a few more decades but because Dark can’t see that Halloway’s heartache exists in relation to another person. Turning the clock back for the elder Halloway won’t magically erase his failure to save Will from drowning (allowing the drunken and long-disappeared Mr. Nightshade the opportunity to be the unsung hero), and won’t mystically restore what fractured between father and son that day on the riverbank. The irony is that what Dark offers and what defeats him is the same: regression. He can only offer Halloway the chance for mystical rejuvenation by regressing him to an earlier age, but it’s Halloway’s regression to the state of childlike optimism that starves the carnival, since it feeds on negative emotions, allowing a chance for Dark to hoist his own petard aboard the aging/de-aging carousel. 

This film is also a visual marvel. Now that it is widely available again, it’s entering The Discourse, and I’ve seen several neutral(ish) criticisms that the film is wonderful “despite” that the “visuals don’t hold up.” I would disagree wholeheartedly, as I don’t think that the representations that we see on screen were ever meant to fully evoke “reality.” As the malevolent train rolls into town, eerie wisps of smoke are drawn over the frames, and this same smoke attempts to capture the two boys later in the film, but it was never really meant to be smoke, it was “smoke” in a more ephemeral sense. Several vistas are clearly matte paintings with the occasional distant, twinkling light in them, but it’s only “unconvincing” if you expect the film to perfectly reproduce a landscape, and I feel that the film informs us that we shouldn’t be expecting that from the first moments, when the adult Will tells us via narration “This is really the story of my father and that strange, leaf-whispery autumn when his heart was suddenly too old and tired and too full of yearning and regrets, and he didn’t know what to do about it.” This is the old home town through the eyes of a child, and what most modern viewers mistake as the “fakeness” of the images used to convey this narrative is an externalization of the mysteriousness of the world to a boy on the cusp of young adulthood, inevitably putting him on the path to being a man whose regrets will crystallize into something manipulable. It’s expressionistic, like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or Metropolis, or the non-narrative “fictional” interludes in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. To hold Something Wicked to a standard of photorealism is to miss the point utterly, and the film’s visual beauty lies in the way that it plays with this self-mythologizing of one’s own childhood, the way that the real becomes the surreal in mind and memory. 

I can’t recommend a revisit (or a first-time watch) of this one more highly, especially in these twilight hours of the spooky season (or, depending on when this goes live, in the dawning days that follow it). Even if you, like me, watched this one once upon a time and weren’t entranced by it, give it another shot. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Return to Oz (1985)

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My first obsession as a child was with Oz. The MGM musical has been a part of my life for so long that I can’t recall the first time I saw it, as its entrance into my life predates my earliest still-retained memories. I can recall the first time I saw any other Oz-related media, however, as I can still remember—even if distantly and vaguely—a Christmas that we spent at my grandparents’ cold New Jersey apartment when I was four years old. They had HBO, and in the early hours of the morning, with the scent of Community Coffee (which we always brought to my grandparents when travelling, as well as several containers of Tony Chachere’s, both of these being luxuries they couldn’t obtain in the north) and my grandmother’s Marlboro Reds in the air, I watched an episode of an animated series featuring Dorothy and company. This was a revelation to me, that there was more Oz to know, and I immediately started to devour as much of it as was available. I was reading by age five and although the early 20th century diction of the Oz books was somewhat difficult to parse, most of the versions available at my library were illustrated, and this was enough for the early years. But what affected me even more than the Judy Garland film was its long distant Fairuza Balk-starring sequel, Return to Oz, which was exactly the kind of proto-horror that my young brain was attuned to. 

Return to Oz opens in Kansas, where the reality of post-tornado living is dreary and dire (and, given the age that I was when I first saw it, likely felt familiar to me in the wake of Hurricane Andrew). It’s nearly winter and the new house isn’t complete, and while Dorothy excuses Uncle Henry’s tendency to stare into space with his feet up, Aunt Em knows that it’s PTSD, even if the terminology doesn’t exist yet. Still, she’s more concerned with young Dorothy’s mental state, given that the little girl no longer sleeps through the night (when she sleeps at all) and is insistent that her imaginary journey to fairyland and the friends she made there are real. Em’s desperation to do the right thing for her niece leads her to leave the girl in the care of a doctor named Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his severe-faced nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) overnight, where they promise that the newly discovered “science” of electroshock therapy will cure all of Dorothy’s ills. A storm comes in the night that allows Dorothy an opportunity to escape, which she does, although she ends up falling into a river; climbing aboard some floating debris, she falls asleep, only to discover that she has awakened near Oz, and is in the company of Billina, one of her chickens, who has not laid an egg since the tornado. 

Dorothy quickly discovers an Oz in ruins. Although she finds the old house she first arrived to Oz in, there’s no Munchkin village nearby; the yellow brick road she travelled for much of the first film is in a state of advanced disrepair; the Emerald City’s brilliant gemstones have vanished as the city’s architecture lies in ruins. Worse, the city itself is ruled by the Wheelers, a pack of feral Klaus Kinski-looking men who travel on all fours on legs that end in squealing wheels. Hiding from them, she finds “the royal army of Oz,” which consists of a single individual, a mechanical man named Tik-Tok who is awakened via a series of wind-up keys. The inhabitants of the city have all been turned to stone by magic, with only Tik-Tok having survived this transformation unharmed by virtue of not quite truly being alive. He’s only the first of Oz’s inhabitants to join Dorothy’s new adventuring party, however, as she also soon collects Jack Pumpkinhead—a Jack o’ Lantern/scarecrow hybrid brought to life in order to scare the witch Mombi (Marsh again)—who governs the empty Emerald City as regent for the Nome King (Williamson again). The final member of the group is the “Gump,” a loathsome creature that Dorothy and company build out of old furniture and assorted attic garbage and bring to life via the same magic powder as Jack was in order to escape Mombi. Adventure awaits! 

Although it may not be the most valuable element of media made for children, I do think one of the things that makes a piece of kid-oriented art have some sense of staying power is the extent to which it encourages imaginary play. A kid who loves The Land Before Time will get just as much pleasure out of going to the playground and pretending to be Littlefoot with their friends as they would out of rewatching the movie. I vividly remember running around in my front yard with my mom as a kid, sometimes on all fours, shouting “To the meadow! To the meadow!” in recreation of a scene from Bambi; the Little Golden Book Scuffy the Tugboat encouraged me to get outside in the rain and play with my own toy boat, and my mother still uses “There’s enough to float Scuffy” as a descriptor of how much rainfall she gets when I call her. Even more so than The Wizard of Oz, The Return to Oz capitalizes on this inherent hunger that children have to create the magical out of the mundane, and it does so using the same extratextual decision that Wizard did—that Oz contains “echoes” of the real world—in a more deliberate way. In the earlier film, this was much more explicitly a way of telling the audience that Dorothy’s adventures were just a dream all along, that her companions were the farmhands and the witch was Mrs. Gulch, translated into her fantastical dreams. As an official sequel, Return follows that same narrative choice, but more subtly and arguably more fantastically. Besides the obvious correlation between Worley/the Nome King and Wilson/Mombi, we also see Dorothy’s “inspiration” for Tik-Tok in the form of the shock therapy device, and she’s given a tiny jack o’ lantern by another patient (who is the spitting image of the missing Ozma, princess of Oz, who also happened to be Jack Pumpkinhead’s “mother”). 

This is something that all children do, applying personality to toys and items and giving them voices and roles in their imaginary play. Even if kids don’t pick up on that being what’s happening in the film, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t unconsciously get absorbed and make their internal worlds just that much more magical. That’s not even counting the number of kids who realized that they could imagine returning to a fantasy land in disarray as a new adventure to play out, following the yellow brick road once more, but one that’s twisted and broken. What if I pretended I was in NeverNeverLand, but without Peter? What if Fantasia needed another Bastian to give the Empress a new name? What if Narnia fell? (Admittedly, Prince Caspian opens in the ruins of the Pevensie’s castle Cair Paravel and The Last Battle features the actual end of Narnia, but you get what I’m saying.) 

I’ve spent enough time praising the film for its potential to inspire imagination, which, while valid, isn’t praise for the film as a text unto itself. Every time I watch Return, I discover (or rediscover) something new to love about it. For one thing, this is a film that I never really thought of as being funny when I was a kid, but there are one-liners and jokes aplenty that will no doubt appeal to any adults in the audience (one of my favorite smirkers is Dorothy’s reply to Jack’s confusion that Tik-Tok might still be able to talk after his “thinking” spring had run out, which is to say that “It happens to people all the time”). My favorite thing about the film is the presence of the copper kettle-like Tik-Tok, who was always my favorite character in the books as well, with the eighth book in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz (specifically the one with this less-than-honest cover) being read no less than fifty times in my childhood. He’s just adorable. I love him. Billina is perhaps the second best non-human actor in the film, a Henson Company creation that’s such a perfect recreation of a Buff Cochin Bantam hen that there are moments where I know she’s a puppet and others where I know she’s a real chicken, but there are many more where I could not tell you if she’s “real” or not to save my life. 

If the general public remembers this one at all, it’s usually negatively in comparison to their memory of the MGM picture, or they remember this one specifically for being on the scary side. While Wizard’s Wicked Witch of the West scared generations of children, this film had multiple frights that play out over the course of the film. The escape from the sanatorium is notably frightening, as the nurse screams into the pouring thunderstorm for Dorothy and her benefactor to return before they fall into a river and nearly drown. The Wheelers are scary, with their squealing wheels (inspired by the squeaking gurneys in the Kansas portion, naturally), and several of them are turned to sand and desiccate before blowing away when they fall into the Deadly Desert while pursuing Dorothy and friends. The Nome King’s death as he becomes more rocklike before crumbling and melting away in a hellish fire, his stone skeleton frozen into a screaming death face before it eventually crumbles, is also noteworthy, as is much to do with the Nomes and their kingdom in the first place (their faces moving about in stop motion on various rock faces remains impressive to this day). But the most memorable scene is one that I would argue remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema, including horror made for adults. At one point in the film, Dorothy must sneak into the chambers of Princess Mombi, which she has already seen contains dozens of glass-fronted cabinets containing the detached (but still living) heads of various Ozian women, which she changes to suit her mood as easily as changing hats. She awakens Mombi’s original head, which then begins chanting her name in a guttural, almost unearthly voice, as all the heads around her scream and Mombi’s headless body rises from her bed to attack. It’s fantastic!

It’s only a matter of time before this film gets lumped in with its intro-to-horror brethren as fodder for slop content along the lines of “CaN yOu BeLiEvE they showed THIS MOVIe to KiDs!!?!” that I’ve started to see pop up online. (Newsflash: if you’re under a certain age, you may not realize this, but art used to be created for multiple groups to enjoy and get something different out of because we didn’t all have individual devices programmed to shovel unchallenging, hyper attuned, algorithmically-driven, intellectually incurious fodder into our brains every waking hour). Enjoy it now before the internet tries to ruin it for you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Moon Garden (2023)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the dreamworld fantasy film Moon Garden (2023).

00:00 Welcome

01:22 Inu-Oh (2022)
05:11 It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
08:22 Thanksgiving (2023)
11:35 The Marvels (2023)
22:06 The Killer (2023)
28:00 A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
33:45 E.T. (1982)
39:40 Godzilla Minus One (2023)
42:50 FYC Screeners

1:06:20 Moon Garden (2023)
1:33:13 Best of 2023 Catchup

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Oink (2023)

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I don’t watch enough modern children’s animation to know what adults are supposed to get out of it, but whatever it is I do know that it’s missing from Oink.  The recent farm animal morality tale is billed as the first stop-motion feature ever produced in the Netherlands and, if true, that’s the only remarkable thing about it.  I assume that all most parents want out of children’s films is amusing flashes of vibrant colors to babysit the kiddos for a couple hours, accompanied by metaphorical messaging that’s wholesome & innocuous enough that it won’t poison their little developing brains (i.e., “Believe in yourself,” “Don’t be selfish,” “Obey your parents, your teachers, and the police state,” etc.).  Oink is passable on both counts, at least in my estimation.  It’s got an adorable hand-animated stop-motion technique akin to the recent French film My Life as a Zucchini, which offers a welcome, tactile counterbalance to our post-Pixar CG animation landscape.  Its messaging is a little more daring than its visuals, deliberately teaching kids vegan & vegetarian values in opposition to the evils of the meat industry.  Some parents will object to that blatant political advocacy, but only because there isn’t much else happening onscreen to distract from it.  There’s plenty of anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist messaging in modern children’s media, but it’s often buried under distracting, for-the-parents pandering like Shrek parodying The Matrix, or the Angry Birds dabbing, or the Minions twerking, or whatever.  Oink does feature a cute cartoon animal doing goofy physical comedy for the whole family’s amusement, but all of its drama is centered on children’s desire to not see that animal butchered for sausage meat, so that there isn’t much to it beyond its overt politics.  Essentially, it’s moralistic propaganda for children with a cute piglet mascot.  So, if you’re not a child who needs the moral conundrum of industrialized meat consumption explained to you in simple, black & white terms, there just isn’t much happening onscreen worth engaging with.

As you can tell by the title, the animal in peril is an adorable piglet named Oink.  The cutesy baby pig is adopted by a misfit Dutch girl with uptight vegetarian parents who cannot abide the chaos an untrained pet brings into their household, but they relent to their daughter’s infatuation with the animal almost instantly.  The pig is accompanied by an estranged grandfather figure from the United States, who’s reluctantly invited back into the family home despite past selfishness & cruelty to his own daughter.  It’s immediately clear that the grandfather encourages the protagonist’s affection for the pig because he wants to fatten & butcher it for an upcoming sausage-grilling competition, one he narrowly lost the trophy for decades ago.  There’s no twist or nuance to this foreshadowed villainy.  As the competition approaches, he kidnaps the pig and attempts to feed it directly into the meat grinder.  All butchers & meat eaters are monstrous in this shameless vegetarian propaganda.  They’re intimidating old men who lie to their families, sneak rat tails into sausage links, and chase children down the street, yelling “I’ll put you in the meat grinder!” at the helpless tykes.  Oink‘s anti-meat messaging makes Okja look subtle by comparison, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem if there were literally any other moral or dramatic tension in the film.  I wasn’t especially shocked or offended by its vegetarian righteousness as an occasional meat-eater myself.  Although, I did object to a last-minute claim that vegetarian sausages taste better than pork; that’s just a lie.  It’s just that I’ve already weighed out the grey-area nuances of how my personal meat consumption affects my fellow animals and the planet we share, and I’ve ultimately decided for myself that meat is a sometimes treat instead of a dietary cornerstone (after a few sporadic years of cutting out beef & pork entirely, most recently inspired by the aforementioned Okja).  Most adults watching Oink have likely already wrestled with the nuanced morality of that personal decision, and so the film’s naked vegetarian messaging is only really useful to adults if they’re looking to convert children to a specific side of that internal debate.

Oink is at its best when it functions as pure visual comedy.  There’s something classically funny about calm family gatherings being disrupted by a rambunctious pet, especially when that pet is as small & cute as Oink.  The film even goes a step further by disrupting that prissy decorum with scatological mayhem.  Oink shits everywhere, smearing long streaks of brown clay all over his hapless owner’s once-pristine family home.  He also continually farts stop-motion clouds of cotton and, eventually, saves the day with his overactive colon.  The film’s scatology is funny, but it’s never as shockingly over the top as the recent stop-motion gross-out The Old Man Movie, which was similarly billed as the first stop-motion feature from Estonia.  Its depressive outcast protagonist is adorable & relatable, but the movie doesn’t dig nearly as deep into her emotional turmoil as My Life as a Zucchini does with its cast of melancholy orphans.  The Netherlands may be lacking in stop-motion feature films to be gushing over, but the world at large is not, with plenty more novelty & nuance to be found in recent titles like Mad God, Wendell & Wild, Marcel the Shell, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and the still-not-released-in-the-US Little Nicholas, to name a few.  Everything that happens in Oink is meant to underline how cute pigs are and how despicable it is that Texan barbeque enthusiasts like to kill & eat them.  That dynamic is just far too morally & thematically simplistic for the film to amount to much, at least not for adults.  The best I can say in its favor is that it’s got an adorable visual aesthetic and I got a few solid chuckles out of the stop-motion pig farts.  Well, that, and at least it’s not another Shrek.

-Brandon Ledet

The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

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I have no idea how long the term “kindertrauma” has been lingering in online media discussions, but I have been seeing it a lot lately.  It’s a useful, succinct description of a very specific phenomenon that means a broad range of things to a broad range of people.  Kindertrauma movies are the movies that scared you as a young child, before you developed enough media literacy to fully understand what you were seeing.  It’s the snippets of films that replayed in your childhood nightmares, distorted exponentially out of proportion the further you got away from the source.  My own half-remembered kindertrauma clips were the janitor’s closet prison of The Lady in White, the bicycle surgeons of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the cotton-candy cocoons of Killer Klowns from Outer Space . . . all from movies my daycare owner’s teenage daughter happened to tape off the TV.  For a lot of Millennials, images from the Canadian cheapie The Peanut Butter Solution ranks high on that list.  It’s kindertrauma royalty.

The Peanut Butter Solution is just one of dozens of children’s films produced for the Canadian series Tales for All, but it’s the one that enjoyed the widest international distribution and the one that boasted the most baffling out-of-context images.  It has all the gravitas of an Afterschool Special—right down to its dinky Casiotone score—but it’s a total nightmare for the young & unprepared.  It’s a charming tale of local winos who died in a late-night squat fire while trying to keep warm, then befriend a local schoolboy as ghosts.  The boy is so freaked out by the squat’s charred wreckage that he’s scared bald (a condition his doctor diagnoses as “hair ’em scare ’em”), so the ghosts have to coach him on how to get his mojo back with a secret hair-growth recipe passed around among undead drunkards.  Only, he puts in more peanut butter than the recipe calls for (to help it stick better to his scalp, duh), so his hair starts going freakishly long, practically a foot a minute.  This, of course, leads him to being kidnapped by his ornery art teacher, who imprisons dozens of his fellow classmates in an underground sweatshop that transforms his hair into magical paintbrushes.  Any five-minute stretch of the film is enough to fire up the imaginations of kids who happened to catch it out-of-context on cable in the 80s & 90s, sticking to the backs of their minds like so much Skippy brand peanut butter (who paid for their prominent ad placement in the titular scene).

The Peanut Butter Solution is driven by the kind of little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between “Hansel & Gretel” and The Pit.  It pretends to hold educational value for its pint-sized, impressionable audience, warning of the dangers lurking in abandoned buildings, strangers’ trucks, and overactive imaginations.  It’s heart’s not really in that, though, and any attempts to make sense of its internal logic is just a path to madness.  This wonderfully deranged tale is only truly interested in connecting the dots between a random assemblage of low-intensity menaces that freak kids out: teachers, bullies, the homeless, pubic hair, etc.  It obviously couldn’t get away with adapting the standard “I dreamed I was naked in class” nightmare that a lot of kids have, so it stripped its protagonist naked in the only place that wouldn’t compromise its PG rating . . . and then it goes even weirder places.

Kindertrauma movies are obviously hyper specific to the eras when their freaked-out audiences were young children.  Titles like Willy Wonka and The Wizard of Oz are iconic enough that they’ve inspired nightmares for entire generations of children for decades, but I feel like it’s the much smaller, more disposable media that qualifies as proper kindertrauma – the kind of cheap-o nightmare fuel that doesn’t stick around long enough to become culturally familiar, so it just privately burns in your brain for decades as low-heat nightmare fuel.  I’ve seen a lot of those titles for the first time as a fully formed adult— Stepmonster, Paperhouse, Return to Oz, Troll 2, Gooby, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, etc.—but it’s always clear when you spot them; you can always tell “This warped someone’s brain as a kid.”  They’re rarely this unpredictable, though. They’re also rarely this distinctly Canadian, considering that The Peanut Butter Solution happens to feature Céline Dion’s first two songs recorded in the English language.  Even if you weren’t traumatized by it as a small, soft-brained child, it’s still a total Canuxploitation nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Petite Ourse

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In the opening minutes of the coming-of-age fantasy Turning Red, I was crushed by the stomach-pit realization that the movie was Not For Me.  Overwhelmed by the sugar-rush hijinks of the soon-to-be-ursine heroine introducing all of her goofball friends & personality quirks in rapid, smooth-surface CG animation, I nearly ejected the DVD and rushed it back to the library in panicked defeat.  I’m mostly glad I stuck it out.  I understand that Pixar is respected as the current high standard of children’s media, but I’m too disconnected from the comedic sensibilities & visual artistry of modern computer animation to distinguish the gold from the pyrite.  It all looks & feels the same.  Still, I did appreciate Turning Red as life-lesson messaging for little kids, who are ostensibly Pixar’s target audience even if they’re not the pundits tweeting hyperbolic praise for the studio.  The last couple Disney animations I remember watching (Coco & Encanto) taught kids to obey & forgive Family at their own expense; Turning Red directly conflicts that poisonous wisdom, encouraging children to rebel & grow into their own individual selves no matter how uncomfortable it makes their parents.  It also frankly discusses menstruation and the other bodily changes of puberty, which feels remarkable & commendable for a film with such a young target audience (even if they’re discussed through the same talking-animal fantasy device that accounts for most modern mainstream animation). Both of these life lessons—that your personal autonomy & chosen community matter more than your family’s wishes and that the daily functions of your body are nothing to be ashamed of—inspired mini online nontroversies among Conservative parents when the film first hit Disney+ a couple months ago, which is how I know that it’s a special work even though it superficially resembles so much mediocre #content in the same medium.  Turning Red might not be For Me, but I respect that it’s a genuine good in the lives & brains of the young people whom it is for.

I normally wouldn’t criticize a film I didn’t expect to enjoy from the outset, but there is one moment from Turning Red that has stuck with me in the way it recalls the premise of a recent film that was For Me.  Throughout Turning Red, a 13-year-old mama’s girl struggles to distinguish her own personality from the expectations of her supportive but overbearing mother, an already complex dynamic that’s further complicated by both the mother & daughter transforming into gigantic red pandas when they get too emotional.  Within their climactic panda fight that threatens to destroy downtown Toronto (or at least ruin a well-attended boy band concert in downtown Toronto), they finally connect on an intimate, honest level – meeting in a calm, psychic space represented by a dense forest.  In that forest, the daughter encounters a younger version of her mother when she was 13 and emotionally struggling, comforting her until she regresses from her angry panda state.  That moment is strikingly similar to the latest Céline Sciamma picture Petite Maman, in which an 8 year old girl meets & comforts the 8 year old version of her own mother in the woods behind the mother’s childhood home.  The mother-daughter dynamic in Sciamma’s film is more distanced than combative, but the conflict is resolved in the exact same way first-time director Domee Shi approaches it in Turning Red.  If I were a more well-rounded audience (or, more likely, if I were just a parent), I’d be able to enjoy Turning Red & Petite Maman as unlikely sister films that happened to approach generational bonding & maternal conflict through a similar time-travel fantasy device.  Instead, that momentary flash of Petite Maman-style calm in Turning Red only further contrasted Shi’s style against Sciamma’s in my mind, and it only made it clearer that my preferences are heavily weighted to the serener end of that scale.

Petite Maman is quietly magical & emotionally complex.  It’s not Sciamma’s best, but it does touch on everything that makes her work great (especially the observational childhood growing pains of Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood, and My Life as a Zucchini, as well as the tragic limitations of time in Portrait of a Lady on Fire) without ever making a big show of it.  While Turning Red frantically runs in circles making sure every image & moment is exciting! wacky! and fun!, Petite Maman isn’t in a rush to say or do anything.  A young girl magically time-travels to become close friends with a younger version of her mother, but the resulting events of that miracle aren’t especially flashy nor thrilling: play acting, making crepes, having a sleepover, decorating a tree house, etc.  I’m not saying that low-key, understated approach is inherently better or more virtuous than the frantic talking-animal hijinks of Turning Red; it just happens to be my tempo.  That’s likely because it calls back to a calmer style of live-action children’s media from my youth like The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and The Secret of Roan Inish that doesn’t have many modern equivalents in a post-Pixar world.  It’s funny that the one moment when Turning Red slows down to match that tempo, it happens to depict a scene straight out of the woodland mother-child time travel premise of Petite Maman.  I don’t know that most kids would have the patience to sit with that quiet, unrushed magic while reading subtitled dialogue for the length of a feature film (only a slim 73 minutes in Petite Maman‘s case), but it’s nice to know that it still exists somewhere in modern mainstream children’s media, even if only for a brief reprieve.

There is no reason to pit these two movies about magical mother-daughter relationship repair against each other.  Even Céline Sciamma sees the value in Domee Shi’s more chaotic, hyperstimulating storytelling style.  In a recent LA Times interview, Sciamma acknowledges that “Pixar’s latest resonates with Petite Maman as a part of a matriarchal mythology finally coming to fruition in cinema as more women are able to tell their own stories.”  She says, “A film about the libido of kids is so politically bold.  And [Turning Red is] so tender in the release it gives to kids about friendship, about their hearts.  It’s an important film.  If I had seen it at 10 years old, it would have been my favorite film.  I would have been obsessed with it. […] I’ve already seen it three times.  I keep telling people to watch it, especially if you have a kid in your life.”  Personally, I’m surprised that I made it through Turning Red just the once, but I do agree that its political boldness & emotional tenderness is commendable.  That same interview also notes that Sciamma’s film almost resembled Turning Red even more, explaining, “Initially Sciamma was certain Petite Maman should be an animated feature.  The locations and otherworldly aspects, she believed, would lend them to be hand-drawn.  Also, she thought, an animated version could prove more democratic for children if dubbed to avoid subtitles.”  I’m glad that she backed away from the animation sphere, even though it would have been more accessible to younger audiences.  Not only does Sciamma’s insistence that Petite Maman works better as a tangible “ghost story with real bodies” ring true, but if there were a hand-drawn animated feature out around the same time as the sugary CG hijinks of Turning Red, I would have been a much, much harsher in my contrarian comparisons of their merits & themes.  I should likely stop trying to see the magic most audiences see in Pixar, since I’m just not getting it, but if Sciamma is among its enthusiasts, the problem must be with my eyes & ears, not the content.

-Brandon Ledet

The King’s Daughter (2022)

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I fully understand the mockery that met the mermaid fantasy movie The King’s Daughter when it was dumped into theaters this January.  Filmed at Versailles in 2014, the cursed production has been collecting dust for seven long, bizarre years, mostly waiting for the funding needed to complete its CGI.  The King’s Daughter was supposed to be released as The Moon and Sun in the spring of 2015.  Obama was president then.  Its star, Kaya Scodelario, was a hot commodity, fresh off the set of the hit TV show Skins.  Its bargain bin CGI would’ve been laughable even seven years ago, but getting displaced outside its time only makes it feel goofier than it already is.  It’s a movie made of leftover scraps, loosely stitched together with Bridgerton-style “Once upon a time” narration from Julie Andrews, turning over each scene like the brittle pages of a crumbling book.  The King’s Daughter is the exact kind of barely presentable debacle that cordially invites internet mockery; it’s more punching bag than movie.

And yet, picking on it feels unnecessarily cruel.  This is a cute, harmless (and, despite itself, gay) wish-fulfillment fantasy for little girls.  Its target audience is so young & uncynical that it mostly gets away with being outdated & uncool.  Adults might snicker at every “Meanwhile …” interjection from Andrews that clumsily lunges us towards the next disconnected scene, but young children are only going to see an aspirational tale of a rebel artist who makes friends with a magical mermaid despite her mean father’s wishes.  Pierce Brosnan stars as a highly fictionalized King Louis XIV, who commissions the capture of two very special creatures: his illegitimate, impoverished daughter (Scodelario) & a mermaid citizen of Atlantis (Fan Bingbing).  The daughter has a total blast at Versailles, celebrated by her estranged father for her musical talents & her Individuality.  The mermaid has less fun as the king’s prisoner—held captive as a potential fountain of youth—but forms a semi-romantic friendship with his daughter that almost makes her own constant suffering worthwhile; it’s a pretty thankless role.  The whole movie is in service of making the daughter’s new life seem magical & great, so little girls in the audience can live their mermaid-friend fantasies through her.

There are obviously much better mermaid movies out there, from the kid-friendly romanticism of The Little Mermaid to the disco-beat eroticism of The Lure.  Considering the wealth of better-funded, better-publicized titles between those two extremes, The King’s Daughter is harmless & anonymous enough to deserve a pass.  If there’s any reason for an adult audience to seek this film out, it’s to see Pierce Brosnan’s over-the-top, flouncy-wigged performance as King Louis XIV, but I can’t claim that he’s enough of a hoot to be worth the 90-minute mediocrity that contains him.  Otherwise, the only real draw for this film is if you’re a wide-eyed child with a long-running mermaid fixation, in which case no shoddy CGI or online dunking was ever going to stop you from seeing this anyway.  The only real shame of the picture is that it chickens out of making that mermaid-kids’ fantasy explicitly gay, choosing instead to romantically pair Scodelario with a Fabio-style hunk to de-emphasize her obvious attraction to the mermaid.  It’s not the romance novel swashbuckler whose heart-song calls out to Scodelario in the middle of the night, though, and even the youngest, naivest children in the audience will see right through that ploy.

-Brandon Ledet

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (2021)

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The recent Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was a rousing success with both audiences and professional critics, so it’s natural that a subgenre of vintage television hagiographies would follow.  Chicken Soup for the Soul’s movie production wing has now entered the chat with an adaptation of the pop media history book Street Gang, which documents the early development & broadcast of the children’s education show Sesame Street.  Like Won’t You Be My Neighbor‘s museum tour through Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street is a Wikipedia-in-motion recap of its show’s historic bullet points, underlined by a heartfelt nostalgia for its radical, politically pointed brand of Kindness in an era of constant political turmoil (the times, they aren’t a changin’ much).  As a history lesson, the film does a great job contextualizing Sesame Street‘s intent, execution, and impact through the 1970s and 80s; it efficiently packs a lot of background information into a relatively short runtime without overwhelming the audience.  As an emotional nostalgia trip, however, it never quite conjures the same magic as the Mister Rogers doc, which was largely popular because it could wring tears out of an unsuspecting audience like an old dishcloth.

As told here, Sesame Street started as a purely educational public service meant to enrich the lives of Inner-City Kids who were watching television for up to 60 hours a week, mostly alone while their parents worked.  Childhood psychology studies were conducted to parse out exactly what children paid attention to and retained from all that screentime, and how to make the most use out of that engagement.  It turned out commercial jingles for products like breakfast cereal & beer were the most resonant programming among the adolescent audience, so they designed a show that would “sell the alphabet to preschool children” as if it were a supermarket product.  Then, through the process of putting together a show aimed specifically at young urbanites, eccentric puppeteers like Jim Henson & Frank Oz were paired with Civil Rights activists & other Lefties to guide its creative vision, expanding its scope from educational jingles to an all-inclusive utopian vision of a world where “television loved people” instead of being outright hostile to them.  It’s a twisty journey from concept to screen with creative, political input from many, varied minds.  All that amounts to a fascinating history (which I assume is even more richly conveyed in the source material), but not necessarily an emotional gut punch.

Luckily, Sesame Street already has its own emotional gut punch documentary in the Carroll Spinney biography I Am Big Bird, which charts out the beloved puppeteer’s delicate psychological balance as expressed through both Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch.  If you’re looking for a good, wholesome cry, go there.  Because Steet Gang is spread out across so many collaborators and decades of backstory, it can’t possibly pack the same emotional wallop as the Fred Rogers or Caroll Spinney docs.  Between its praise for Spinney, Henson, Oz, songwriter Joe Raposo, and behind-the-scenes shot callers like Joan Ganz Cooney & Jon Stone, it’s reluctant to single out any one creative as responsible for the show’s magic, which makes for good journalism but shaky foundation for an emotional arc.  If there’s any core pathos to the story Street Gang tells, it’s in watching a group of young, fired-up artists & Leftists age into grumpy, burnt-out workaholics as the weekly workload of Sesame Street grinds their enthusiasm into dust.  For the most part, though, it’s just a warm bath of vintage television nostalgia that relies on feel-good throwback clips & behind-the-scenes insight to feel worthwhile.  And it works.  The expectation that these vintage TV docs emotionally destroy you is likely an unfair one; sometimes they’re just Nice.

-Brandon Ledet

The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021)

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On a recent episode of the podcast, I found myself derailing a discussion of Toy Story 3 to complain about the bland, unimaginative sheen of mainstream computer animation, as pioneered by Pixar.  No matter how much admiration I could muster for the daringly morbid themes Toy Story 3 injected into the mold of a modern children’s film, I couldn’t help but be distracted by its autopilot visual aesthetic.  In the wake of Pixar’s resounding success with the Toy Story franchise (the first entirely computer-animated feature films in wide release), we’ve traded in the tactile charm of stop-motion animation and the expressive zeal of hand-drawn 2D illustrations (outside the few anime blockbusters that sneak into American distribution every year) for the least imaginative form of animation possible.  There are scenes in that Toy Story sequel where two characters are talking in close-up that are literally just a loose collection of vague colorful orbs and googly eyes, arranged in a shot/reverse-shot configuration.  It’s depressing to watch as an animation fan, especially since there are so few alternatives to the 3D computer animation approach Pixar has solidified as an industry standard.

During that tangent of old-man grumblings, I forgot to mention that there was a recent computer animated film that I found encouragingly expressive, turning my stubborn mind around about the general uselessness of the medium:  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.  The offset screenprint aesthetic & psychedelic strobe light effects of Into the Spider-Verse were outright dazzling in the theater, whereas most modern children’s films just deploy their expressionless 3D orbs as vessels for hack jokes in celebrity voiceover.  I was reminded of my oversight in failing to single out Into the Spider-Verse as a sign of hope in an otherwise dire mainstream animation landscape while watching the newest release from the same animation wing at Sony, The Mitchells vs The Machines.  Also produced by beloved comedy nerds Phil Lord & Chris Miller (with major contributions from some of the folks behind Gravity Falls), The Mitchells vs The Machines repeats a lot of the same visual techniques that made Into the Spider-Verse such an industry standout in 2018.  It’s more heartwarming & cute than it is blindingly psychedelic, but it’s at least a promising sign that Into the Spider-Verse will not be left behind as a one-of-a-kind anomaly.  The current Pixar standard will not reign supreme forever.

It’s worth noting that The Mitchells vs The Machines meets me more than halfway in trying to work past my CG animation biases.  Not only is its teenage protagonist a nerdy cinephile (something I’m obviously guilty of), but her road trip adventure with her parents orbits around a technophobic distrust in modern, automated tech – falling within the confines of my love for Evil Technology movies that dutifully warn that the Internet is trying to kill us all.  On her way to freshmen orientation at film school, a movie-obsessed dork butts heads with her old-fashioned, tech-sceptical father, while her mother & brother struggle to keep the family’s final days as a unit as memorably pleasant as possible.  That central father-daughter rift is exponentially heightened by a sudden Robot Apocalypse, triggered by an over-ambitious Tech Bro (voiced by Eric Andre) whose willingness to give smartphones power over our daily lives gets way out of hand very quickly.  The movie does its best to temper this humans-vs-technology premise with some counterbalance positivity about the joys of the Internet (mostly in how it connects our cinephile hero to other likeminded weirdos across the country), but it mostly just chronicles a Bob’s Burgers style traditional family’s struggles to adjust to a rapidly automated, synthetic world ruled by laptops & smartphones.

While I’m not as breathlessly enthusiastic about The Mitchells vs The Machines as I was for Into the Spider-Verse, I am tickled that I have an example of a modern computer-animated film that both summates & subverts my skepticism over the technology of the artform.  The Luddite father character isn’t exactly a satirical punching bag in his stubbornness to adapt to modernity, but I did feel as if my unease with an increasingly computerized world (as opposed to the “authentic” world it has replaced) was being openly mocked through that surrogate.  I enjoyed being ribbed like that.  I could go on to complain about how the film’s most expressive, most exciting variations on the CG animation format were the traditional 2D illustrations doodled in its margins, if not only because we used to live in a world where we could have movies entirely animated in that style.  My nostalgia for older formats shouldn’t supersede what’s accomplished here as a shake-up in the medium, though.  This is an energetic, visually imaginative kids’ movie that pushes past the usual limitations of what most CG animated movies of its ilk attempt.  Not for nothing, it also gets online meme humor in a way most mainstream movies would fall on their face trying to emulate.  It’s a film firmly rooted in the language and the humor of a technological world it also thumbs its nose at.

My only real complaint, then, is that it’s a (mildly) technophobic comedy with a Le Tigre song on the soundtrack that’s somehow not “Get Off The Internet”???  Seems like an oversight.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla vs Megalon (1973)

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The last time WrestleMania came through New Orleans, I indulged in a few of the smaller satellite shows that popped up around the city, including one put on by an extremely nerdy promotion out of NYC called Kaiju Big Battel.  Sitting in a brightly lit auditorium after midnight, watching a kaiju-themed wrestling show with a shockingly sober, wholesome crowd, was a one-of-a-kind delight — an experience I doubt I’ll ever be able to fully replicate.  The wrestlers were mostly costumed in giant plush outfits—dressed as hamburgers, 1950s robots, literal dust bunnies, and cans of soup—smashing each other into the cardboard cities that decorated the ring they used as a goofball playground.  I guess it’s possible to take an unfavorable view of an American company boiling down the kaiju genre to such broadly silly terms, considering its heartbreaking origins as an expression of post-nuclear Japanese national grief in the original Godzilla.  However, the further I dig into the Godzilla canon in recent months, the more I’m starting to realize just how faithful the Kaiju Big Battel brand of novelty wrestling is to its Godzilla roots; it’s just calling back to a later, decidedly kid-friendly era of Godzilla filmmaking detached from the giant lizard’s grim-as-fuck origins.

If there’s any one Godzilla movie that could be blamed for cheapening the monster’s brand with broadly silly slapstick comedy, it’s likely Godzilla vs Megalon.  Thanks to an ugly pan-and-scan transfer with an English dub that was allowed to temporarily slip into the public domain, it’s the Shōwa era Godzilla film that was most widely available to the American public for decades — lurking in creature-of-the-week television broadcasts, gas station DVD bargain bins, and MST3k target practice.  Godzilla vs Megalon appears to have a dire reputation as a result, diluting the larger Godzilla brand with misconceptions that the series was always dirt-cheap and aimed at little kids’ sensibilities.  I can’t personally attest to the quality of that much-seen pan-and-scan edit of Godzilla vs Megalon, but the Criterion restoration that’s currently steaming online is both beautifully colorful and wonderfully goofy. It was obviously a rushed, cheap production, but the kaiju battles have a distinct pro wrestling charm to them that makes for great late-night viewing, transporting me back to that Kaiju Big Battel show in the best way possible.  I can’t say the movie doesn’t deserve its reputation as the bottom of the kaiju media barrel, but now that the more important, prestigious Godzilla films are widely available in their original form, I think there’s a lot more room for audiences to appreciate the film’s delirious, Saturday Morning Cartoon silliness for what it is.

The humans-on-the-ground plot of Godzilla vs Megalon feels like repurposed scenes from a 1970s live-action Disney espionage comedy, by which I mean they’re not very memorable or worthy of discussion.  What’s really worth paying attention to here is the pro wrestling booking of the monster fights.  The film is a tag team match.  In one corner, we have the debut (and final) match of Megalon, a profoundly idiotic beetle worshiped by the underwater occultists of Seatopia.  In the other corner, we have the movie’s face: Jet Jaguar, an Ultraman rip-off robot with an insanely wide grin — also appearing in his debut (and final) match.  Neither contender is enough of a draw to carry the movie on their own, so they’re paired with charismatic tag team partners to help get them over with the crowd.  Megalon is paired with Gigan, a much lesser robo-Godzilla derivative than Mechagodzilla, whose non-presence essentially turns this into a squash match.  Jet Jaguar, of course, is paired with Godzilla, a legitimizing tag team partner whose popularity should have been able to forever endear his new robo-friend to children everywhere.  That proved to be an unsuccessful gamble in the long run (Jet Jaguar was never seen or heard from again), but Godzilla appears to have fun trying.  He performs here with the broadly expressive physical language of a wrestler playing to the backseats in a packed auditorium, aiming for big laughs and even bigger wrestling maneuvers that any kid should be delighted cheer on from the crowd.

To its credit, Godzilla vs Megalon does vaguely motion towards the eco-conscious concerns of larger Godzilla lore in its early goings, pitting both the kaiju and the underwater sea cult against us surface humans after our nuclear tests pollute the atmosphere.  The film isn’t earnestly about those themes, though, no more than it’s earnestly about Godzilla or Megalon.  This is Jet Jaguar’s show through & through, as evidenced by the grinning robot closing out the show with his own badass theme song — the same way pro wrestlers replay their entrance music while they lift newly-won championship belts in victory.  Jet Jaguar was created specifically for the film as contest entry from a small child (explaining the not-so-vague resemblance to Ultraman), which is a pretty blatant excuse to sell new kaiju toys & merch.  Because the production was rushed, underfunded, and marketed specifically at little kids’ sensibilities, there isn’t much destruction of towns or cities (outside some crudely inserted stock footage from better-funded Godzilla films), so most of the monster action is staged in an open field, away from the necessity of expensive miniatures.  The result is basically the movie version of Kaiju Big Battel: dudes in goofy costumes body slamming each other in fits of broad, slapstick humor.  It sucks that the kaiju genre was once only associated with that kind of silly novelty entertainment, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining, especially now that the more serious end of the genre is more widely respected and readily accessible.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XyF4pLUGWIU

-Brandon Ledet