Even the most hardcore of Don Bluth devotees find it difficult to defend what became of the man as the world entered the 1990s. It's no secret that Bluth's career did not thrive alongside that of his old friends at Disney once their Renaissance era had kicked into gear - All Dogs Go To Heaven had fared poorly against The Little Mermaid and his next picture, Rock-a-Doodle, was such a disastrous flop that it forced Sullivan Bluth Studios into liquidation and put an end to Bluth's partnership with Goldcrest Films. This time, Bluth had the good sense not to release the film in direct competition with Disney's latest offering, Beauty and The Beast (which was critically acclaimed, surpassed Mermaid at the box office and made history by being the first animated to feature to receive a Best Picture nomination), purposely delaying the US release until spring 1992 (it was released earlier in some foreign markets) when Disney would be out of the picture and the only major competition would be from Kroyer Films' Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. Ferngully wasn't exactly a monster hit, but it still had little difficulty in crushing Rock-a-Doodle at the box office. It didn't help that Rock-a-Doodle endured an even greater critical thrashing than Dogs before it. Whereas Dogs does have a following of ardent defenders who'll insist that it was a misunderstood masterpiece all along, it seems that nobody wants to fight in poor lonesome Rock-a-Doodle's corner. To countless Bluth admirers, this is the film that destroyed their hero, and for that they'll always revile it.
Unfortunately for Bluth and his fans, Rock-a-Doodle's misfortunes were to set the tone for his career path throughout much of the 1990s, with a string of low-key releases that were clobbered by the critics and barely noticed at all by the public, who were too busy lining up to see The Lion King for the umpteenth time. It took until Anastasia in 1997, once Bluth was hired as a creative head of the newly-formed Fox Animation Studios, for him to put out a film that achieved any kind of critical or financial success, and even then it was a very fleeting comeback. After Titan A.E. flopped in 2000, Fox Animations Studios was no more and Bluth was once again pushed off the map, apparently permanently this time (I haven't been paying much attention to what he's been doing lately. Is he still spending a lot of time on Kickstarter?). "Dude, what happened?" is a common exclaim, but to me it's evident that Bluth has always kind of sucked at story construction. It was less obvious earlier on in his career because he was consistently being propped up by someone else's vision. The Secret of NIMH was based on a novel by Robert C. O'Brien, and Bluth follows O'Brien's story pretty faithfully for the first two thirds (then he majorly diverges in order to make Jenner into a more traditional antagonist and it all goes to hell in my opinion). An American Tail and The Land Before Time were made in association with Amblin Entertainment, and Steven Spielberg exercised a lot of creative control in determining how those films turned out. All Dogs Go To Heaven was Bluth's first attempt at an original story where he got to call the shots, and that film has major narrative problems, particularly in the third act, where a huge chunk of the resolution rests upon a stupid singing alligator that Bluth randomly pulls from his backside. Rock-a-Doodle might strike one as a pretty major slide into the maelstrom - an avalanche of storytelling discord that makes Dogs seem entirely comprehensible by comparison - although many of those issues are still cut from much the same cloth as that infernal alligator.
Before I decided to cover it here, I'll confess that I had never actually watched Rock-a-Doodle in its entirety. As a child, I'd caught bits and pieces of it here and there, but I'd never been able to discern just what the hell the plot was supposed to be. I vaguely recall seeing a featurette on the film in an episode of Rolf's Cartoon Club and having a very hard time accepting that the scenes with the twee barnyard animals and the super-sexualised female pheasant (Jesus Christ, I feel so dirty just looking at her) were from the same movie. After referencing the film in my respective reviews for The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven, however, I found that my morbid curiosity had swelled the point that I simply had to get hold of a copy and see what all the fuss was about. The only trailer on this VHS is for Felix the Cat: The Movie, which promises to be "a landmark in cinema enchantment". Uh-huh. Actually, that film never figured in my own childhood and I didn't discover it until I was already into my 20s and happened to fish the DVD out of the bargain bin at my local supermarket. For a quid I couldn't possibly say no. We'll get to Felix, I promise.
What does Hallilwell's Film Guide have to say this time? "Excellent animation is rendered pointless in a poor and confusing narrative." Hmm, actually I think that Halliwell's is being rather generous in calling the animation "excellent". Rock-a-Doodle is not a bad-looking film but it isn't a breathtakingly amazing one either. It's largely on a par with much of what Disney was doing for the 1980s, but by 1991 Disney had seriously upped their game, and Rock-a-Doodle is plainly not in the same league as Beauty and The Beast or The Rescuers Down Under. It's also not in the same league as All Dogs Go To Heaven, which at least had the benefit of pleasingly fluid character animation. Rock-a-Doodle contains only one particularly showy or ambitious piece of animation, and that occurs in the opening sequence, where we glide through outer space and across the surface of the Earth, finally swooping down upon a barnyard and coming face-to-face with our rooster lead. It's a nice sequence, although I couldn't help but think how much grander it would have looked with a Beauty and The Beast-sized budget. Visually, Rock-a-Doodle remains a very characteristically Don Bluth film, with drab, murky backgrounds and characters whose designs are an unsightly combination of tweeness and grotesqueness.
Rock-a-Doodle was adapted (albeit very loosely) from Chantecler, a satirical play by French dramatist Edmond Rostand which first debuted in 1910, about an idealistic rooster who believes that he controls the diurnal cycles with his crowing and the derision heaped upon him by his rival, a blackbird with a far more cynical outlook on life. Actually, Rock-a-Doodle's mere existence might be of vague interest to Disney history buffs, for it was born from one of that company's most infamous discarded projects. An animated film based on Rostand's play was an idea that Walt and his crew had been intermittently revisiting since the 1940s, but it had never gotten particularly far off the ground. Animators Ken Anderson and Marc Davis made a heartfelt attempt to revive the project in the 1960s but were shot down during a notoriously punishing pitch where the Disney executives apparently scoffed at the very idea of a feature film centred around a galline protagonist. To them, there was something about the humble barnyard fowl which made it inherently unsuited to stardom, and that was enough to doom the project from the outset. Bluth, however, saw the potential and, once he had cast off the Disney shackles and established himself as an independent animator, decided to take his own stab at a Chantecler movie - it's pretty clear, however, that the finished product had little to do with Anderson and Davis's original vision. In fact, without having seen Rostand's play, I'm going to hazard a guess that Disney's Oliver and Company was a lot more faithful to the basic narrative of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist than Rock-a-Doodle was to that of its own source, despite Rostand's play already featuring an anthropomorphic cast. For one thing, I'm not clear where Bluth got the (completely deranged) idea that transforming a fable about idealism vs cynicism into an animated lover letter to Elvis Presley was the perfect way of modernising Rostand's play for the New Kids on the Block-loving children of the early 90s.
Of course, Bluth's take on Chantecler was also influenced by the then-recent success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which accounts for the film's misguided (and entirely pointless) efforts to combine live action with animation. Our main character is a young boy named Edmond (so named, I assume, as a tip of the hat to Rostand), played by Toby Scott Ganger, who gets transformed into a cat through the curse of a villainous owl (we'll get to him later). As a human, Edmond and his world are portrayed as live action, but once transformed into a cat he becomes a cartoon creation and finds himself part of an animated world populated by anthropomorphic creatures. The two worlds collide only briefly, during two separate sequences - when Edmond is initially cursed and then at the very end of the film - which is fortunate because the technique is implemented with a terrible naivety. The thing about Roger Rabbit (as I mentioned in my review of Hollywood Dog) is that it worked because the animation and live action were amalgamated in a manner that was, above all else, amazingly believable. You could buy that the live action characters and toons really were part of the same physical universe, as opposed to the latter merely being pasted on top of it, and that Roger and Valiant were genuinely interacting. Roger Rabbit had the budget (with Spielberg on board, securing funds was never an issue) and the persistence of vision (with Richard Williams handling art direction, you could guarantee that every individual frame of animation was going to be damned well perfect) to pull that off; Rock-a-Doodle looks extremely primitive by comparison, and is less convincing even than earlier attempts at mixing live action with cartoons (eg: Disney's The Three Caballeros from 1944). There's also the nagging question as to why Bluth felt that the narrative merited the combination in the first place, other than to latch ahold of the Roger Rabbit bandwagon - Edmond could have been animated in both his forms, or even a cat from the very beginning, and the story would have required little tweaking, while the film would at least have had the virtue of visual consistency. The answer, I think, is that Bluth was going for something akin to The Wizard of Oz, where you have a story split between two contrasting worlds, each with its own very distinct mood and aesthetic - in fact, the live action portions of the film are frustratingly reminiscent of Oz, right down to Edmond being separated from his family and connected to the "fantasy" portion of the film via a storm, and the "it was all a dream - or was it?" ambiguity of the ending. It was certainly very ballsy of Bluth to attempt to mimic one of the most beloved pictures in the history of Hollywood so closely, but alas, it does not pay off - there's no sense of wonder or enchantment when Edmond becomes a cat and gets mixed up with the animated critters, because both worlds are so flat and ill-defined. It's not helped by the awkward story structure, which struggles to set up the two worlds and intertwine them in a smooth and coherent way.
The film opens with an animated prologue, in which we're introduced to the character of Chanticleer (Glen Campbell) and his alleged sun-raising abilities. Chanticleer is universally beloved by the diurnal folk for apparently bringing them sunlight every morning, until one fateful occasion where a mysterious rooster shows up right before dawn and forces Chanticleer to fight for his territory. Chanticleer is able to fend off the challenger, but is distracted from his usual crowing duties and subsequently exposed as a fraud when the sun rises without him. Scorned by the very animals who once adored him, Chanticleer decides that there's no longer a place for him on the farm and sets off for the city. The film then abruptly transitions into a live action sequence where we see Edmond and his mother (Dee Wallace) reading the story from a picture book. Edmond's father (Stan Ivar) walks in to report that a massive storm is breaking outside and he needs the family's help in securing the home from impending flood. Much to his chagrin, Edmond is ordered to stay in his bedroom because he's deemed too small to be of use. Edmond decides that he can fix the problem by calling for Chanticleer to come and raise the sun, thus ending the storm (in addition to Oz, this portion of the film blatantly takes a few cues from The NeverEnding Story). Chanticleer doesn't answer the call, but he does attract the attention of a few other animated varmints who show up at his bedroom window, and that's where things start to get weird for him.
One of Rock-a-Doodle's few really notable distinctions is that it provided Phil Harris (famous for playing Baloo in Disney's 1967 adaptation of The Jungle Book, Thomas O'Malley in 1970's The Aristocats and Little John in 1973's Robin Hood) with the final role of his career - Harris retired from acting thereafter and passed away in 1995. Here he voices Patou the dog, a character taken from Rostand's play (although once again I'm willing to bet that the Patou we see here bears little relation to the original character created by Rostand - one of his defining traits here is his neverending struggle to tie up his shoelaces). Harris turns in a noticeably less energetic performance than he did in any of his Disney roles, and I don't know if that had more to do with Harris's age or a lack of enthusiasm for the script. The only cast member who appears to be having any kind of fun with with their material is Christopher Plummer, who voices the aforementioned villainous owl, the Grand Duke. Plummer plays the Duke with an enjoyably hammy pomposity, breathing ample life into what is essentially a pretty weak excuse for an antagonist; the Duke opposes Chanticleer because...well, he's an owl and owls are nocturnal, and it stands to reason that owls would prefer a world where the sun doesn't shine so that their reign of terror can finally begin, correct?
"Owls will deafen us with incessant hooting!"
The Duke does not want Chanticleer to return and is outraged that this meddling kid is attempting to make contact with him, so he resolves to devour him and be done with it. He turns Edmond into a cat because they're easier to eat than human children (makes sense - owls have to swallow their prey whole, after all), but before he can do the grisly deed Patou waltzes in and rescues Edmond. It transpires that Patou and his friends have taken a wrong turning and wandered into Edmond's house while attempting to reach the city. They realise that they made a grievous error in driving Chanticleer away and will be doomed to a world of stormy darkness if the rooster does not return and make the sun shine again and...okay, hold up a second, already we're running into a serious problem with narrative messiness here. Let's go back and reconsider that prologue. It doesn't quite mesh with how the rest of the film plays out and contains a number of elements that I suspect were intended for a different version of the story altogether - the mysterious rooster who showed up to challenge Chanticleer, for example, feels as if he should have held greater narrative significance, but he's casually explained away (in Patou's voiceover narration) as an agent sent by the Duke and then never mentioned again. There's also the massive inconsistency as to whether Chanticleer's crowing actually is responsible for making the sun rise or not. Apparently it is, or else the characters wouldn't be in this predicament, but this contradicts what we see in the prologue, where the sun blatantly is shown rising by itself. The animals have concluded that they misjudged the situation, but it's never explained what actually was going on. Was it all just trickery on the part of the Duke? If so, then do he and his minions have sun-raising abilities of their own? Obviously, the Duke would have to believe that Chanticleer's crowing really could raise the sun or it would be futile to get rid of him. Again, I suspect that there was once an earlier version of the story where Chanticleer couldn't raise the sun and the Duke's motivation was somewhat different, before Bluth decided to introduce the whole aspect of Edmond being sucked in from his human state and having to stop a storm which was affecting both worlds; the prologue looks to have been salvaged from this version and Patou's narration tacked on to fill in a lot of the cracks, but it isn't exactly watertight.
Edmond puts a dead raccoon on his head, reveals that he regularly visits the city and agrees to show the other animals the way. He sets out, leading a motley crew consisting of Patou, Peepers the mouse (Sandy Duncan), the bespectacled brains of the operation, and Snipes the magpie (Eddie Deezen), the frenzied comic relief. There's a sequence where they have to escape from Duke's minions via an aqueduct and Snipes' claustrophobia nearly does them in, but before long they arrive safely at the city and...you know what, already I have another question. Is this supposed to be the same city that Edmond says he's been to many times as a human child? For story purposes we're led to believe that it is, only it too seems to be populated mainly by anthropomorphic animals. I say "mainly" because there's a scene where the cat, dog, mouse and magpie are inside a diner and I'm really not clear as to whether the other patrons are meant to be humans or beasts (with Bluth's grotesque character designs it's very hard to tell); if the former, then I'm amazed that none of them are in the least bit perturbed by this assortment of disease-carrying vermin strutting around their eatery in plain sight. This leads us into one of Rock-a-Doodle's biggest problems; namely, that the world-building is frankly shit. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's among the most head-scratching I've ever seen in a motion picture. The confusing amalgamation of live action and animation doesn't help matters - given that the environmental fallout caused by Chanticleer's absence is implied to be responsible for the storm in Edmond's world, we're left to conclude that the humans and talking animals do indeed inhabit the same physical universe, although the film doesn't really give you a handle on whether Edmond is still in that same world in a different form or has somehow slipped into a freaky alternate version where everyone is a cartoon animal. The Wizard of Oz, by contrast, made it painstakingly clear where Kansas ended and Oz began.
Edmond, Patou and the others discover that, since leaving the farm, Chanticleer has transmogrified his talent for crowing into a full-on Elvis Presley pastiche and made quite a name for himself as the headlining act at a nightclub run by sleazy vulpine manager Pinky (Sorrell Brooke). Pinky is our secondary antagonist; once he gets wind of the fact that Chanticleer's old friends are looking to bring him back to the farm, he conspires to prevent Edmond and co from ever making contact with him. Pinky should already have ample motivation for doing so, because he's an avaricious prick who obviously doesn't want to lose his club's star attraction, but just to make the story seem a little less disjointed it's revealed that he's working in league with the Duke as part of a grand conspiracy to keep Chanticleer from returning to the farm and raising the sun. That Pinky happens to know the Duke feels like a real stretch and merely accentuates just how messily integrated are the assorted narrative threads. Again, there's the underlying sense that we're watching parts of several different stories which have been cobbled together in a half-baked attempt to create a whole. Pinky tries to keep Chanticleer distracted by having one of his lesser acts, Goldie the sexualised pheasant (Ellen Greene), pretend to fall in love with him. Goldie initially resents having to perform in Chanticleer's shadow but later ends up falling in love with him for real; we have be told rather than shown this however (again, through Patou's blatantly tacked-on narration), as their relationship receives practically no onscreen development. Ultimately, Goldie is more a plot device than character, as well as a creepy bit of eye candy thrown in the hopes of baiting a few fanboys (influenced, I assume, by the wild enthusiasm heaped upon Jessica Rabbit, who as a character had more substance because she was also such a great femme fatale caricature). Greene attempts to inject a bit of her Little Shop of Horrors charm into the role but is given precious little work with. In fact, Chanticleer himself doesn't fare massively better; we see him perform a handful of Elvis routines but don't actually get to spend that much time with him behind-the-scenes. For the alleged hero of the piece, he's kept at a curious distance throughout. I strongly suspect that the bitty little snippets we see of Chanticleer's foray into celebrity are remnants of an earlier script where his city adventures actually were at the forefront, before the decision was made to shift the focus onto Edmond. Perhaps Bluth decided that those Disney execs were onto something when they questioned if a chicken had what it takes to keep an audience engaged for 70-odd minutes. More likely, he concluded that the movie needed a young protagonist in order to make it more accessible to children.
So, Chanticleer and Goldie fall in love, and then Chanticleer signs a picture deal, and this is another issue I have with the film's narrative - the time frame (just like everything else) is extremely confusing. Are we supposed to conclude that the entire plot takes place over the course of a single night? Without Chanticleer to raise the sun the world exists in a state of eternal night, of course, but for Chanticleer's career and his relationship with Goldie to progress as they do we would ideally be looking at weeks and weeks worth of development here. Maybe Edmond and his friends really are away for that long, but I'm not sure how that fits in with his parents still struggling to protect the home from flooding, or with the animals who are forced to sit out the adventure back in Edmond's bedroom, having to fend off owls with a flashlight and a couple of dying batteries. It's also puzzling that none of the city-dwellers appear to notice that the sun has disappeared from the sky - outside of a couple of newspaper headlines, it barely gets a mention at all. It's almost as if the city exists in its own private bubble and is impervious to what's going on elsewhere in the world.
The city portion of the story contains a lot of padding, as Edmond and friends try to get past Pinky's efforts to stop them meeting Chanticleer. We get a sequence where Pinky bans all cats, dogs, mice and birds from entering his nightclub, so patrons who fall into those categories (Edmond included) attempt to circumvent this blatant discrimination by dressing up as penguins and - hold up, penguins ARE birds, you morons. There are also a handful of sequences involving the Duke's runty assistant, Hunch (Charles Nelson Reilly), who pursues Edmond and co to the city and makes multiple attempts to pick them off, only to be tripped up by his own crippling lack of co-ordination every time. Hunch is a pretty dreadful character who serves no useful narrative purpose other than to give the Duke some kind of second-hand connection to the action once it's shifted well away from him. In many respects, he feels like an attempt to recreate Reilly's character Killer from All Dogs Go To Heaven, in being a scrawny, ineffectual underling who's frequently abused by the big bad, but with a greater emphasis on making him comedic. I very quickly learned to groan whenever Hunch appeared onscreen.
Anyway, Edmond, Chanticleer and friends end up inside a helicopter (again, don't ask) and fly back to the flooded house to do battle with the owls, who are currently preparing to feast on the critters left behind. During the inevitable showdown between Chanticleer and the Duke, the former struggles to regain the confidence to crow while the latter shows off his entirely arbitrary talent for swelling himself to enormous size (I'm sorry, what?). Edmond tries to act as Chanticleer's cheerleader, so the Duke knocks him unconscious and Edmond subsequently doesn't get to see it when his rooster pal lets out a mighty crow and causes the sun to come hurtling back across the sky. The Duke's final fate...well, I'm not going to spoil it for you here, but rest assured that it's every bit as stupid, nonsensical and eye-poppingly warped as everything leading up to it. In other words, it's absolutely perfect.
The owls have been defeated, but the animals are sad because of the harm that's come to Edmond during the confrontation. As they gather around his unconscious body, they're shocked to see him morph back into a live action human boy, whereupon we see a hand tenderly mopping his brow...and suddenly we're back in Kansas (or wherever) again, with Edmond's mother assuring him that the storm has passed and everything is now fine. Edmond tries to tell his mother of the role that Chanticleer played in stopping the storm, but she insists that Chanticleer isn't real and that his story is only make-believe. Left alone in his room, Edmond picks up the storybook he was reading earlier, only for the characters to leap from the pages and start dancing with him (in a sequence so visually appalling that it makes Hollywood Dog look like Roger Rabbit). Blatantly, the film was looking to evoke same kind of feeling you get at the end of The Wizard of Oz, where all the evidence points toward it being a dream, but you get so caught up in the fantasy world that, much like Dorothy, you want believe that it was a real place. Unfortunately, that's all negated here by Patou's intrusive voice-over, which makes it very plain that we're supposed to accept all the Chanticleer stuff as real. Certainly, it would make far more sense if it was a dream - it would account for the huge number of plot holes/internal logic failures the story unloads on us, along with the film's generally scrambled and delirious tone - but having Patou comment on Edmond at the end and how his mother "never knew what really stopped the storm" robs it of all potential ambiguity. I've read that Patou's voice-over was added in quite late in the game, when test audiences struggled to make sense of the story, and I find that very believable - the narration feels awkwardly implemented all throughout, either because it explains things rather poorly (the prologue), tells us things we should ideally be shown (eg: Goldie falling in love with Chanticleer for real) or spoils key events before they happen (Patou assures us during Goldie's very first scene that she'll end up joining the good guys, presumably to placate parents who complained she was of dubious character). It feels for all the world like a last ditch attempt to give some semblance of coherence to a Frankenstein's monster of a story which wasn't pulling together convincingly. I argued at the beginning of this review that story construction was never Bluth's strong point, but what makes Rock-a-Doodle a particularly woeful example, I think, is that it's just so obvious that the story got cut up, revamped and sewn back together so many times that it never settled on any clear sense of what it was about or the world and characters it was trying to convey. I don't know if Bluth had tight deadlines to work toward or if the film was in danger of running over budget (I'm led to believe that Goldcrest Films, angry at how little All Dogs Go To Heaven had made, gave him a hard time during this production), but I guess that at some point he decided to cut his losses, mash together 70-odd minutes worth of material and just hope that the damned thing would break even. Not the greatest career move when your mortal enemies were already at the point of bagging a Best Picture nomination.
The Verdict:
There's no denying that Rock-a-Doodle is a horrible, horrible piece of film-making. The narrative is flimsy and aggressively chaotic (in a manner that reeks of endless haphazard rewriting), the combination of animation and live action does not enhance the experience dramatically or aesthetically, and its attempts to rip off the story framing devices of The Wizard of Oz wholesale are both jaw-droppingly audacious and incredibly misguided. And yet, I have to admit that I rather enjoyed it, in a way that I didn't The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail or All Dogs Go To Heaven. It plumbs such remarkable depths of weirdness, inanity and all-out mindfuckery that in the end I had to surrender every shred of reason and common sense and just go along for the ride. Everything about it, from the grotesque delirium of the animated city sequences to the cornball artifice of the live action scenes with Edmond and his family, is so bizarre and tonally misjudged that it offers up a perverse kind of pleasure. I'm actually amazed that this film doesn't have a more robust cult following - it has "midnight screening" written all over it. And I do have a strange kind of admiration for how authentically (if unintentionally) nightmarish it is, with its endless labyrinth of twists, turns and sensory bludgeonings; in terms of replicating just how unsettling and dislocating the experience of dreaming can be, it rings far truer than did Dorothy's adventures in Oz (so much so it feels a cheat that Edmond apparently isn't dreaming). I know that many Bluth fans see this film as his fall from grace and hold little more than contempt for it, but for me it may well be his one moment of accidental genius, sandwiched in between a lot of triteness and mediocrity, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with a penchant for the weird and inexplicable. Holy shit, a Don Bluth movie I actually liked? Is that the earth I feel moving beneath my feet right now?
Incidentally, I don't know if Kenneth Anderson or Marc Davis ever saw Rock-a-Doodle, but if I were them I'd certainly be pissed that the world ended up with this version of Chantecler and not my own, all because some Disney suits back in the 1960s had this bizarre prejudice against stories about chickens. Neither Anderson nor Davis lived to see Chicken Little in 2005, when Disney had apparently reversed its own stance on galline protagonists (perhaps Aardman's Chicken Run had convinced them there was nothing to be afraid of), but I'd imagine that would only have been extra salt in the wounds. Chicken Little is easily the single most regrettable thing to be sitting in Disney's "animated classics" canon right now; that the main character is an animated chicken is definitely the least of its problems.
He's all fuwwy, and his lisping makes me swick.
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