MovieMeditation’s Diary Reviews // “Come and meditate with me!”

Great job MM. I'm surprised you only gave Pinoccio 2.5/5 though.

It used to be a favorite, it really did, but that rewatch everything just went wrong. Nothing really worked for me. :/

I hope to rewatch it again and I will like it a lot more like I used to.

Since there's no review, why did Tarzan get 5 stars from you? Seems like a rare pick.

Congrats on your Disney accomplishment MM! It was an awesome idea and it looks like it went well. I bet Walt Disney himself would be proud!

I never really liked Tarzan. They did some interesting research for their drawing style, the way he snowboarded across vines and stuff, but I didn't really enjoy the story or characters or anything. Mulan and Hercules are my favorite Disney cartoons. But honestly I just don't really get any enjoyment out of any of the Disney cartoons anymore. I feel like I've outgrown them.

50 movies is a lot... to commit to that and get through them all. I'm still in awe.

While I am a big fan of animation I generally don't like Disney. While I liked a few movies like Bambi and Pinnochio, movies that I put into my top 100 animated films, I generally dislike the condescending tone of these movies generally is a turn of: these movies feel like they are talking down to their audience and since I was about 8-9 years old, I felt a bit insulted when I watched them. Just because they are made for children doesn't mean that they must be simplistic, specially because children when they are 10 years old are actually smarter than the average adult, it only results in dull, heavy handed simplistic movies.

Also, I dislike the music style used in the movies (remind me a bit of bollywood music and dancing) and the animation is used excessively (characters are also animated poorly: they are off model all the time which makes it look like they are plastic bags filled with water) and to poor effect and art style is generally dull and boring, without interesting elements. So well, I dislike most of the elements that you can find in a typical Disney animated movie.

Wanna watch animation? Well, I even find stuff like South Park more interesting both in visual terms and in writing, of course if you are serious is Miazaki, Oshii, Takahata, Anno, Norstein, etc. I don't understand what some people see in most Disney movies.

Just my honest opinion.

I think that the Disney filmography is too expansive to blanket with statements like this. Sure, some of the movies have poor and boring animation, but then you have films like Pinocchio, Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, and Tangled, some of the best animation ever created. I can't really understand what about South Park's animation makes it interesting. The people making it will be the first to tell you that it looks bad and that's the price to pay for getting episodes out in less than a week.

I remember seeing some behind the scenes footage of the making of Bambi, and Tarzan, and they actually did go to considerable length in terms of technique and research. There's more constant motion than a lot of animated films. But compared to animation like Fantastic Planet, Angel's Egg, or Jin Roh, Disney cartoons just don't have the depth that I can explore and be enthralled by as an adult.

I wanted to write a full review but never finished it because I wanted to do it properly. Anyways, I'll post what I didn't finish in the end here.

But first I'll just try and explain it real easy and short. This was one of my favorite films as a child and one of my favorite movie experiences ever; I even saw it at the cinemas. So perhaps there's some nostalgia involved that lifts it up on a full five star rating and not perhaps a four out of five.

But I really do think this is a great film. The story about being different and not fitting in seems to have been perfected at this point by Disney, because even though we have seen it many times before especially by Disney, I think they nailed it here - maybe also because man and beast or so close yet feels so far away here. It's told in such a humane and understandable way that kind of grounds the whole deal but in the end it comes out feeling like something much bigger.

I think the characters are all great and I like how Tarzan not only has to fit in between apes in general, but every individual; like his mother and whether she loves him for who he is, the accept and respect of his father, Kerchak, as well as his friends and those around him. Then comes the relationship with the humans, like love, friends and enemies; all is told well and packs emotion and honesty.

The movie is also suitably dark for my taste, really pushing that rating to the max with blood, dead bodies, animal cruelty/capturing and even hangings. Then there is the "off screen" things like betrayal, distrust, outcasting and whatnot, which is not exactly told on children's level all the time. It's actually way more than that.

Then there's of course the visual beauty of it, which just captures the depth and endless feel of amazement of the jungle. The mix between 2D and 3D animation is done in such a groundbreaking and fitting way, which works and makes us feel like we are in the jungle and flying through trees and whatnot. And I also noticed a lot of amazing direction and cuts throughout, especially during the opening tree house escape and when Tarzan learned about life (noticeably with the projection of still images).

Then there's the, in my opinion, great soundtrack by Phil Collins. Yes, it's "world music" or whatever I see people call it, but I think his style suits the film and it's simple but effective. I know many people dislike his songs here, but I don't.

I think this movie packs a lot and I don't know how "rare" this pick is, honestly. It has a 88% critics score on rotten tomatoes and a 79/100 critic score on metacritic - not to mention the audience reactions is just about the same as those Disney classics you mentioned above, ursaguy.
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Lastly, here is my unfinished and unedited review if anyone's interested:

That's one small step for beast, one giant step for man

'Tarzan' is the lone proof that one should never listen to critics or any mass critical judgment as a true guidance in movies. 'Tarzan' even wants to be exactly like what we have seen before. But in the end 'Tarzan' is a different kind of animal entirely. An untamed beast who can't be controlled. Many call the movie too dark, but I saw it in my childhood and though scary indeed it shouldn't be a major problem. I don't want people to think I deliver this review on nostalgia or my admiration for Phil Collins. I'll state my opinions and hope you'll understand. What I don't understand is the mixed reactions to this movie. If you ask me this is Disney's return to glory after and uneven but admittedly solid few years after The Lion King. Disney brought me lots of entertainment, but it took a while before I could feel Disney deep inside my heart again. 'Tarzan' is Disney's return to emotionally strong stories of universal understandings and opposites meeting.

It is far from the first time Disney deals with difference between two characters, which creates inner and outer conflict, but because of ape and man being closely related as well as Disney almost perfecting the tale at this point, 'Tarzan' can do more than roaw at us, it can touch us and tell us stuff we know but makes it feel alive and fresh. In my opinion, every little detail showed about the difference between Tarzan and the apes is carefully measured. Never has the explanation of being different or unique been as spot on aurally and visually. We see it, we hear it, we feel it

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Well, it's only about 50 movies, about 45 handdrawn ones. These 45 hand drawn movies share a lot of characteristics in terms of direction, writing, art style and animation style that make up Disney's style. I dislike in general Disney's style.

Tangled is computer animation and very impressive in terms of detail. But very poor in artistic terms.

Pinocchio, Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty and Mulan don't have very impressive hand drawn animation and their techniques are rather amateurish to my eyes. Problem is the lack of physical realism: nothing looks like it has real mass and the level of detail is not high.

Mulan's animation looks like some flash animation from newgrounds:


Characters lack detail and physical realism is sorely lacking, the animation looks the same as same as in Clone Wars and other cartoon network cartoons. Although Mulan abuses more of poorly integrated computer animation as well.

Compare with a Miyazaki movie made a couple of years later, the physical realism is much sharper, characters and objects feel like they actually exist and move according to newtonian physics:



The level of detail in the backgrounds is also enormously higher as well as the characters have much more detail in their models. Also look at the effect of wind on Chihiro's clothes.

Although Miyazaki/Ghibli movies are not fair comparison, I regard some sequences in those movies as the most impressive pieces of animation I have seem in feature lenght format. Although other animated films also reach very high levels of detail and realism:



True it's frame rate is lower than Disney (12 frames a second versus 24 frames a second) but the level of detail is much higher. I even find some TV animation more impressive on a technical level than Disney's hand drawn movies, with much much higher levels of detail and physical realism:



Still not quite on Miyazaki's level (that level will never be surpassed in hand drawn animation if not ever attained again). And the framerate is very low but the level of detail is even higher than on Miyazaki's films, with very clean lines (a characteristic of Kyoto Animation). And that's TV animation produced with a tiny budget of 150,000 dollars a episode.

It has a distinctive style and is creative in it's use of limited time and resources. Making it more artistically impressive than Disney's animation, which is artistically poor despite being super expensive to produce. Although South Park is not very efficient as well, Hibike! Euphonium cost less to produce and episodes aired on a weekly basis (though pre-production of a season takes a couple of months), and has much higher level of detail and physical realism.

In some ways it's very impressive the resources that were mobilized to make these movies. The result, however, is not proportionally impressive.

In Japan individual animation is not done with a lot of research since resources are limited, however, there are 30,000 animators in Japan and 400 animation studios, the techniques and methods are developed and utilized by many studios, the result of an evolutionary process spanning many decades. Which allows 150,000 dollar episode sereis like Hibike! Euphonium to have animation that is more impressive than a hand drawn 60 million dollars hollywood blockbuster movie.

That works against them however. As characters and objects move too much and become off model all the time, becoming like blobs of liquid instead of solid looking characters and objects. Some animation is criticized from lack of movement but movement has to be done correctly to be better than a static image.

When I was 8-9 years old I already felt Disney movies were cliche and uninteresting. They are just too puritanical and effectively chained by their ideology. That does not apply to all children's animation and not even to all American children's animation, Pixar's Inside Out, for instance, is much more sophisticated.

Please get out of my thread with that single-minded subjective piece of block on block writings, Guap.

You are not going to "convince" anyone of something that is ultimately subjective anyways. After all, you are obviously in the minority and your opinion on Disney sounds very much like it lies with you personally and not that it's bad filmmaking or whatever. Like always, you try to convince people that you are right about something that is your own opinion. You can't just state facts (mixed with personal opinion) and thereby convince others to think the same.

I think the problem is that we're looking at different things. To me, character expression is a big deal. Disney's animation has fluid character movement that allows them to externally show emotion. The two TV shows you linked have static faces and choppy movement if the animators need to do anything more complex than shifting the position of a body. The background dancers in the Giovanni's Island look great, but the people in the foreground have very stilted movement. If you think that Sleeping Beauty does not have "very impressive hand drawn animation", you're wrong. No way around it. Disney used an anamorphic widescreen just so he could show off the backgrounds, which are some of the best ever. Pinocchio and Fantasia are reliant on context. They might not hold up against modern hand-drawn animation, but they invented a fair number of the techniques used in that modern hand-drawn animation. It's groundbreaking work, the best of animation in the pre-WWII era. I'm not going to entertain the Miyazaki comparison. You're right: yes Miyazaki does it better and yes that's an unfair comparison because you can be not Miyazaki and still be good.

I admire you're enthusiasm Guap, and I'm always glad to see you around Movieforums.com, but sometimes lengthy debates bog down a person's thread. It's better if you make those kind of discussions in a clear and concise manner in a thread that isn't specifically oriented for "debate" in the first place.

Sorry I'm late buddy, here's a belated congrats from me.

Now that you've finished reviewing Disney movies, you should move on to their merchandise and of course Disneyland(s).

Funny thing is i have a bad hearing and since i live with my hysterical parents, I can't volume it up, so i have to make it my mission in life to get every word. Anyway I agree 100%, it's an easy-going hippie rock'n'roll disco cranberry sauce flaming pie man type of superhero movie. It reminds me of Watchmen.

love that

Thank you so much for checking in, Beatle, despite current situations. I missed ya in here. I hope my reviews and this reply will lighten you up a bit my friend!

You're welcome, MM. Well, it's nice to hear you were thinking of me. It did lighten me up. Thanks.

Nice review yet again MM, I give it the same rating as you.

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