Two Dozen and One Greyhounds (aka Are Those Naughty Dogs Back Again?)

The third canine-centred episode of The Simpsons' classic era stands out as the anomaly for a number of reasons. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" (2F18), which aired April 9th 1995 toward the tail end of the sixth season, is the only entry of the four that isn't focused on the relationship between Bart and Santa's Little Helper. You get the impression that the Simpsons kids are much more protective of the dog (and his progeny) than their parents, which tracks with what we saw in those previous episodes, but there's no sense here that Bart relates particularly strongly to Santa's Little Helper because he sees in him so much of his own incorrigible self. Truth be told, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" isn't really a Santa's Little Helper episode at all, with the dog's most significant participation confined largely to the first act. He serves as a catalyst to the main conflict and then takes a backseat, making this not much of a step-up from his turn in the previous season's "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song". And yet his presence is felt all throughout this story. The plot involves him courting a female racing dog and siring an improbably large litter of twenty-five puppies, all of which have his face, and his appetite for destruction. We might not spend a lot of time with the leading pooch himself, but we have twenty-five bags of his troubled genes crawling around in his stead - which turns out to be way more Santa's Little Helper than anyone (not least the Simpsons themselves) can handle.

An advantage that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" should have over the other "classic" Santa's Little Helper episodes is that, out of the four, it is the least prone to sentimentality. A shortcoming shared by "Bart's Dog Gets an F", "Dog of Death" and "The Canine Mutiny" is that their resolutions all hinge upon "boy and his dog" cliches played mawkishly straight, but this is something that "Two Dozen" sidesteps altogether. It isn't interested in tugging on the heartstrings, but in revelling in the inevitable chaos that comes with attempting to live under the same roof as twenty-five puppies, sire dog, dam dog and an ostracised cat. For the first two acts, this is as free-wheeling a farce as The Simpsons had ever tried its hand at by Season 6. Eventually, it settles into becoming one of those "Bart and Lisa Investigate" stories that have been a staple of the series since "Krusty Gets Busted" of Season 1, but even with some belated menace thrown into the plot (in the form of Mr Burns, and his nefarious plans for the puppies), it never takes itself overly seriously. There are action sequences that anticipate the high-adrenalin climax of "Brother From Another Series" (with Bart and Lisa being held at gunpoint and escaping by sliding down a chute), but here it's mostly in quotation marks.

Unfortunately, none of those anomalies work in the episode's favour, and I'm inclined to rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as both the worst of Season 6 and the weakest of the show's runty litter of Santa's Little Helper outings. It is, if nothing else, more watchable than the mean-spirited "Dog of Death", but it is a far junkier experience. I feel a slight trepidation in saying that, as I get the impression that this is the best-regarded Santa's Little Helper episode among Simpsons fans, and I'm sure that is 100% down to the musical number that Burns performs toward the end about his sociopathic love of animal hides. No dispute that it's an extremely energetic and unforgettable set-piece, and I suspect that having it land so very late on in the game convinces viewers that the episode as a whole was a lot stronger then it was, since that is the last major spectacle it leaves us with. This is a case of The Simpsons cheekily exercising the writer's escape clause outlined by Robert McKee (Brian Cox) in the 2002 film Adaptation. :"The last act makes a [story]...You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end and you've got a hit." My question is, if the "See My Vest" sequence didn't show up to give us a much-need serotonin-boost at the eleventh hour, is there anything at all about this episode that would stick out to you as memorable or inspired? Aside from maybe the Rory Calhoun reference that works precisely because it's so unintelligible?

The thing is, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is a cute episode, but it's also kind of dumb. What's startling is that it's dumb in a way that I don't think there had been any real precedent for until now, at least in terms of A-stories. It makes a bit more sense when we take into account who wrote it. This was a Mike Scully script, and while Scully was still entirely capable of writing episodes with strong narrative backbones and sincere character observations (see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season), his worst indulgences were already starting to creep through, notably in his approach to writing Homer (again, see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season, or for a particularly foreboding example, "Lisa on Ice"), and "Two Dozen" feels like the first occasion on which he really let those eccentricities run rampant. I don't much care for the direction the show went when Scully eventually took over as showrunner, and I can somewhat see the blueprints for that direction in this episode. The story is half-baked and excessively cartoony, the humor is crude and physical, the Simpsons themselves are written fairly unsympathetically (although that's par for the course with these dog episodes) and the mindfulness for tying up loose ends is lacking (see next paragraph). The small mercy is that Homer is nowhere near as horribly written as he was in "Lisa on Ice" (in part because this plot doesn't give him as many opportunities to be an all-out dick), although Snowball II gets the worst of what we have - in "GET THAT CAT OUT OF THE WAY!" you can pick out the aggressively entitled tone he'd be assuming a lot under Scully.

For once, however, I am not inclined to name the eternally maligned Snowball II as the critter done dirtiest by this particular doggone script. That honor goes to Santa's girlfriend, She's The Fastest. "Two Dozen" kicks of with Santa's Little Helper in an unusually hyperactive mode and the family failing to realise that his behaviour problems stem from sexual frustration, until he breaks free and chases down and mounts a female dog on the tracks. Rather than doing the sensible thing and getting their dog fucking neutered, the Simpsons decide to take the female dog into their abode (her owner, the Rich Texan, seems only too happy to relinquish her, laughing uproariously when Marge asks if he'll miss her loyalty and companionship). It's a move that makes the Simpsons look stupid as hell, if they don't foresee where this scenario is headed, although maybe that's part of the joke. Needless to say, She's The Fastest didn't become a long-term fixture of the Simpson household - after the events of this episode, she's never seen again, and "Two Dozen" never attempts to give her character closure or account for her subsequent absence. I can't say I'd gotten terribly attached to this dog or had been anticipating many great adventures with She's The Fastest to come, but I do find it cheap and lazy that the script would go to such lengths to incorporate this additional pet into the Simpson fold, only to forget about her the instant she's served her narrative purpose. Could they not have worked in at least a throwaway line indicating that she'd fallen out with Santa's Little Helper and gone off with some other family? I'd like to give Scully the benefit of the doubt and assume there was something along those lines in an earlier draft that was cut for time, but the fact of the matter is that She's The Fastest is only a plot device, brought in solely to proliferate Santa's seed, and the episode has no qualms with treating her as such. In fairness, she's not the only animal to be acquired by the family and then completely memory holed - after Season 4's "Duffless", we'd heard nary a peep from that hamster who was adopted by Lisa and abused in the name of science/vengeance. The difference being, I suppose, that Lisa was chiefly interested in that hamster as a test subject, and there was no indication that she'd intended to keep it once her experiment was concluded (as terribly out of character as it seems for Lisa to treat an animal as a resource and then discard it). In "Two Dozen" we have Bart and Lisa begging for ownership of this dog and her original owner walking out on her, so it doesn't sit half as well with me for her to fade from the picture without thought or comment. There was an alternative - rather than saddling the Simpsons with a second dog and getting all that extra story baggage, they might have had the dam's owner dump the unwanted puppies with them (as happened with Eddie's litter in the Frasier episode "The Unkindest Cut of All"). As a side-note, the character design for Santa's girlfriend also bugs the living snot out of me - they gave her human eyelashes, for Pete's sake!^[1]

Returning to the dog track allows the series to get reacquainted with its beginnings in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", and while the explicit references to the events of that episode are a little jarring, given how drastically far removed "Two Dozen" feels from it tonally, I do like the subtler callbacks that don't advertise themselves so openly. She's The Fastest's racing number is 8, just like Santa's Little Helper before her, and Homer is once again swayed into placing a bet based on the perceived significance of the dog's name - which on this occasion actually works out for him, or at least it would have done if Santa's Little Helper hadn't disrupted the race. She's The Fastest's career is tanked, and for better or for worse, she takes up residence with the Simpsons. We get to see how the family's attitude toward responsible pet ownership has further degraded since the days of "Bart's Dog Gets an F", where it was recognised as a major transgression for Santa's Little Helper to be left to roam the neighbourhood unattended. In this episode, Marge, of all characters, willingly opens the door for the dogs so that they can wander all over town as they please, in a fanciful sequence that ends with the dogs seated at their own personal table outside Luigi's restaurant and coming to blows over what must be the toughest spaghetti strand in the world.

This might be a good point to acknowledge that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is, specifically, The Simpsons' tribute to the Disney animated canon (long before they themselves fell under the ownership of the Mouse), and there's an extent to which we need to view it through that lens. The title alone is a dead giveaway that the plot aspires to pilfer a few details from the 1961 classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians (it also evokes Fox's 1950 film Cheaper By The Dozen, then yet to be remade with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt), but the Disney references are scattered and varied enough to suggest a broader running theme. The romantic interlude with Santa's Little Helper and She's The Fastest is plucked straight out of  Lady and The Tramp (1955), while the climactic "See My Vest" number is a flagrant rip-off of the "Be Our Guest" song from Beauty & The Beast (1991). (It's probably not an intentional reference, but that especially corny gag where Snowball II bats away the catnip also puts me strongly in mind of that random Parisian in The Aristo-Cats (1970) who decides to lay off the Merlot.) The entire story is a love letter to Disney, and as such it might be given leeway for being a little more cutesy and anthropomorphic than your average Simpsons outing. On the episode commentary, Groening talks with pride about how they always strove to have the animals in the series behave like real animals, with the rare anthropomorphisms being reserved for situations where they'd ring a deliberately disturbing note (the example he cites is in "Bart Gets An Elephant" of Season 5, where Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II attempt to walk upright and say "We love you" in a manner that suggests the effort is causing them excruciating pain). Ironic, then, that "Two Dozen" itself proves to be something of a deviant in that regard, with quite a few jokes that have the animals behaving in distinctly un-animal ways that, while self-consciously silly, feel as though they're intended to be charming rather than weird, eg: Santa's and She's snickering at the Shar Pei in the park (the Shar Pei's reaction is great, though) and Snowball II rubbing her eyes in disbelief. Still, such touches are handled with a sharp enough Simpsons edge. The sequence that's the most conspicuously Disney-ish is Santa's and She's aforementioned date around the town, and while this section is a little too long and frothy for my tastes, it's kept afloat by a playfully subversive undercurrent. There's a moment where the dogs have their picture taken after poking their heads through a photo stand-in, which is a self-evidently ridiculous scenario (who's taking the picture? Who is the photo even for?), except it's revealed that the image on the other side is a recreation of one of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paintings of dogs playing poker. To the untrained eye, this might read as a harmless, perfectly kitschy cultural reference, but a more seasoned Simpsons viewer might interpret its appearance as ominous, having been trained by "Treehouse of Horror IV" to see those pictures as inherently cursed. The spaghetti kiss moment from Lady & The Tramp likewise goes humorously wrong, with the apparent lovebirds turning into snarling beasts the instant their resource guarding urges are activated. And when we finally get to "See My Vest", a great part of that joke is that what Burns is singing about is so horrifically far-removed from the intentions expressed by Lumiere and chums to that same cheerful tune (although it might have appealed to Gaston, who used antlers in all of his decorating).

There was, of course, always more to Disney than cute creatures batting their unnaturally elongated eyelashes. There was an element of danger, typically involving the separation of the young and innocent from protective paternal figures and/or a deliciously flamboyant villain, and while "Two Dozen" eventually yields both of those things by bringing Burns into the mix, we first have to sit through a very laggy and staccato middle section that's little more than a string of skits about puppy-inflicted mayhem. The birth of the twenty-five pups brings what I personally consider to be the most unforgivable aspect of this episode, this being that it contains what has to be by and far the worst, most cringe-inducing line of dialogue ever spoken by a Simpsons character, at least in the 90s. I refer to Bart's "Hey look, a really small dog just fell out of Santa's girlfriend!" Forget that "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" line my brother used to rag on hard in "All Singing, All Dancing", this is just heinous. Among other sins, it makes it sound as if Bart doesn't understand where babies come from, which of course he does. He had that video he showed his class about how kittens are born (the ugly truth) in "Lisa's Substitute", and he'd surely have put it together that puppy births are going to be much the same process. Then again, the whelping of She's The Fastest is a surprisingly clean business, devoid of afterbirth, umbilical cords and meconium, and the puppies are born with their eyes already open. Disney's depiction of the process in One Hundred and One Dalmatians honestly felt a touch more realistic.

I'm not going to go after "Two Dozen" for its far-fetched set up because at this point in the series it just seems futile. The premise of the Simpsons seriously thinking that they can live with twenty-seven dogs (plus a cat, a fish tank and - possibly - a hamster somewhere in the backdrop) is perhaps no more fanciful than the premise of them attempting to co-exist with a full-grown African Elephant chained up in their yard. It does mean, however, that when the threat of removing the puppies is finally introduced, it seems like common sense prevailing and not something you can really feel too mad at the adult Simpsons for imposing. Lisa's response - "Is that what we do in this family? When someone becomes an inconvenience we just get rid of them?" - would be a patently spurious rebuttal even without the cutaway gag showing Abe in miserable solitude at the Retirement Home. Sorry Lisa, but you clearly don't have room for all these dogs, and it's evident enough by now that your family are shitty pet owners anyway. This is, I think, what makes "Two Dozen" a weaker installment than either "Bart's Dog Gets an F" and "Dog of Death" - for all of those episode's deficiencies, they dealt with the trials of pet-keeping in a grounded fashion in which there were genuine stakes. When Bart (twice) found himself in the position of having to speak up for the beloved dog his callous parents were prepared to sacrifice to make their own lives a little easier, his distress and indignation felt real and searing. Here, we have a ludicrous scenario that plainly isn't sustainable, and which the family look obtuse for ever allowing to get this far. You just can't feel the same sympathy for the children's position this time round because, yeah, the line does have to be drawn somewhere. Their unreasonable pleading nevertheless manages to buy the puppies a short reprieve, with their parents agreeing to keep them so long as they don't cause any more trouble (um, right, because that's really going to happen). At this point we suddenly leave the milieu of a whimsical Disney film and find ourselves plonked right in the middle of the hellish sitcom banalities The Simpsons is so fond of sending up. Marge and Homer are hosting a dinner party for Reverend Lovejoy, Homer's old army drill sergeant (the remnant of some prior unseen adventure where Homer joined the army and was mistakenly discharged a month early) and the regional director of the IRS. Exactly the kind of trio whom you wouldn't want present to witness the stomach-churning spectacle of your roasted turkey ripping open to reveal two flea-ridden gremlins inside. The puppies are evicted!

Rehoming the puppies presents its own challenge, thanks to the pups' harrowing tendency to vocally object whenever any prospective new owner tries to separate them. "We've got to be realistic..." Marge insists (a little late to say that now), before Burns shows up and offers to give all twenty-five of them a loving home. We know right off the bat that Burns' intentions for those dogs can be none too savoury. The family themselves are savvy enough to recognise this, and to deny Burns ownership of the puppies, but not so savvy that they don't also turn their backs on the puppies for long enough for Burns to stuff them into a sack and take them anyway. "Two Dozen" took its sweet time, but now we finally have something resembling a decent conflict. Actually, when Burns shows up the tone of the episode changes drastically, going from Happy, Dopey and a bit Sleepy to something much more energetically demented. It stands to reason - it is so often the Disney villains who are the MVPs of their stories, with their extravagance and their dark eccentricities, so it should not surprise us that this rule would apply to Disney pastiches too. The third act kicks off with a sly moment of self-awareness, by pretending to go through the motions of having the Simpsons treat the puppies' disappearance as a genuine mystery, before cutting abruptly to the chase, with Bart and Lisa infiltrating Burns' mansion to investigate. They observe Burns taking curiously doting care of the puppies, prompting the Simpsons kids to ponder if they've perhaps misjudged the decrepit billionaire. But no. Burns lays out his sinister agenda with nauseating starkness, adhering to the traditional Disney model of belting out your heart's deepest desire with a lavish song and dance number, in this case an upbeat showstopper detailing the gruesome array of animal skins that went into the attire in his personal wardrobe. His latest fashion hankering is for a tuxedo made from greyhound fur - a narrative development that's honestly no stranger or more fucked-up than the Disney film it's spoofing, where ninety-nine Dalmatian pups were similarly threatened with the prospect of becoming a garish fur coat, although Burns' evil motives are expressed with a shameless theatricality that would put even Cruella herself in the shade. "See My Vest" stands out among Simpsons musical sequences because it is such a delirious exercise in bad taste - a head-spinning voyage through one man's hedonistic vision of every living creature under the sun as the raw materials to be cut up and modified into whatever hideous garment takes his fancy. Every taboo regarding animal mistreatment is violated; Burns has both slippers made from an endangered rhino and a beret made out of a decapitated poodle (less an outrageous fashion statement than a serial killer deviancy). The show was at least able to forgo its usual hard-on for hamster abuse on this occasion, though I suppose those loafers, former gophers aren't so far-removed from a hamster.

To be honest, this is all a bit much even for Burns, which goes back to what I said about his actions in this episode being in quotation marks. He's playing the cartoonishly flamboyant villain in a Disney parody; his shameless theatricality might be jaw-dropping, but it also ensures that it stays just unreal enough for comfort. He also gets to show the inkling of a sensitive side, having earmarked twenty-four of the puppies for death, but intending to spare the one that's endeared itself to him with its ability to stand up on its hind legs (just like Rory Calhoun - you know, the man who's always standing and walking), and whom he's christened Little Monty (even at his most doting, there is something faintly perturbing in his desire to transform this loveable pup into a reflection of his own ego). Bart and Lisa are able to exploit Burns' affection for Little Monty to their advantage, but not without first making a daring escape with the other puppies down a laundry chute. I'll concede that there are some underrated gags in the attempted rescue sequence - I like Bart's "Hush, puppies", and in particular that strange, ominous shot of the door handle slowly turning, as Burns and Smithers take an inexplicably long time getting back into the room that holds the puppies (Smithers, incidentally, doesn't get to be much more here than a quietly disapproving bystander to Burns' scheme). All that I can say is that it is mighty fortunate that the puppies were all able to vacate the laundry basket before Bart and Lisa landed, or else they would have risked squashing a few of them in the effort.

The group does not get far before being cornered by Burns and Smithers, at which point Bart gets a hold of Little Monty and mixes him up with the others, hoping that if Burns can't pick out his favourite dog then he'll have to treat them all with the same mercy. Unfortunately, Burns has no trouble distinguishing Little Monty, because he's the only puppy of the twenty-five who'll stand on his hind legs at his command. Thinking quickly, Bart is able to coax the remaining twenty-four to stand upright by dangling a line of socks above them (the culmination of a running gag in which the dogs were shown to have a perpetual hunger for socks), so that Burns can no longer tell which one is Little Monty. The whole scenario is a little hokey, but it plays neatly on the reason for Burns' contradictory outlook on the dogs, in that he sees Little Monty as different to the others and worthy of attachment because he's able to assert himself as an individual. It nearly backfires, for in practice all that Bart has done is nullify Little Monty's individuality, so that none of the dogs now stand out to Burns, and he initially resolves to kill them all. But even a heart as frosty as Burns' cannot help but melt on being confronted with a barrage of plaintive puppy-dogs eyes, and he decides that the creatures are simply too cute to kill. It's an undeniably sentimental turn from a character who, just a few minutes ago, seemed totally unabashed about wearing a decapitated poodle noggin, but Scully's script is clever enough to temper it by having Burns' evil not immediately subside, but suddenly swing in a startling new direction. The only crime more shocking than killing puppies would be killing children (unless it's Sideshow Bob attempting to kill Bart, in which case it's only business as usual in the woods), and Burns declares himself prepared to do just that, turning his gun on Bart and Lisa, with no apparent motive other than than that he can. But of course, he can't, for even those pesky meddling Simpsons kids are too disarming when you have them at their most vulnerable. Has he learned his lesson that fur is murder? Kind of. Burns insists that he'll never wear another item of clothing made from an animal...provided that animal can do an amusing trick.

As it turns out, Burns has a more ambitious trick in mind than simply standing on two legs. The epilogue reveals that he went on to successfully train the rowdy rabble into champion race dogs (Santa's Little Helper, as we'll recall, was a lousy racer, so the puppies obviously took after their mother in that regard), adding a further ten million dollars to his already bountiful funds. Meanwhile, Homer isn't exactly taking the realisation that he let these world champion dogs slip through his fingers. To its credit, the episode bows out in a uniquely ballsy fashion, with one of the strangest, most hair-raising endings of all of Season 6 (worthy of Season 5, in fact), which sees a horrified Marge wandering down to the basement to find Homer's silhouette swinging in an ominous manner designed to suggest that he's hung himself. What's going on is naturally a whole lot sillier - Homer is gripping onto a ceiling beam whilst batting an old lightbulb, which is apparently the most constructive outlet he has for his chagrin at losing the dogs. The episode then fades out right as the burning bulb smacks directly into his forehead, with obvious results. Homer suffering some form of physical mishap and screaming in agony is yet another Scully indulgence that would overstay its welcome once he took over, but here the execution is sharp and well-judged. If it's any consolation to Homer, I doubt that the puppies would have become world champions if they'd stayed with the Simpsons. It's not as though they had the resources or the know-how to train those dogs, who'd have instead spent their days lounging around, devouring socks and watching Baywatch. Besides, from an animal welfare perspective the greyhound racing industry isn't a whole lot less contentious than the fur industry, so you could argue that the puppies didn't actually win either.

 

Sky 1 edit alert!: Back in the day Sky 1 would always trim the dog track sequence to remove the frames where you see Santa's Little Helper mounting She's The Fastest, although we still got Bart and Lisa's confused commentary right after, making it plain enough what those naughty dogs were up to.

Also, gone was this entire exchange:

 

Bart: Oh, me and Santa's Little Helper used to be a team. But he never wants to play any more since his bitch moved in.

Marge: Bart, don't ever say that word again!

Bart: Well that's what she is! I looked it up!

Marge: I'm going to write to the dictionary people and have that checked. It feels like a mistake to me.

 

I am in two minds about this. Bart is referring to a literal dog as a "bitch", not a woman, but the way that statement is framed, it is still clearly intended to have misogynistic connotations, so I get why Sky might have felt uneasy about it. What puzzles me is that they always retained that moment in "Marge In Chains" where Apu calls Marge a bitch - I don't remember seeing that episode and ever not hearing it - and the context there is so much meaner-spirited. Regardless, it's not a huge loss, this being a limper variation on a joke that was much better done in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". Bart doesn't get nearly the same relish out of calling She's The Fastest a bitch as he did Herb a bastard.

Finally, I noted in my review of "Dog of Death" that there was unequivocally some anti-cat sentiment among The Simpsons' writing staff. To set the record straight, this observation does not apply to showrunner David Mirkin, who is evidently a cat person and devotes a chunk of the "Two Dozen" commentary to speaking with affection for all of the cats he's owned. Scully, by comparison, seems to have had mostly bad luck with the animals - growing up, his childhood pets were a cat he was severely allergic to (but which was beloved by his mother), and a canine vagabond that ditched him after only two days.

 

[1] I get that it's a reference to the antiquated practice of creating female counterparts by taking the male's character design and giving it long eyelashes and maybe a ribbon (see Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, etc). I don't have to like it, however.

Bundles of Joyce: Epic (aka Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen?)

I find it fascinating how in vogue the works of American children's author William Joyce were among animation bigwigs as the 2000s were going into the 2010s. In a period of roughly six years, we received no less than three feature adaptations of Joyce's books, each from a different Hollywood animation studio. Disney got in first on this trend, with the 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons, a loose re-working of Joyce's picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In late 2012, DreamWorks' animation released Rise of The Guardians, taken from Joyce's book series The Guardians of Childhood, only for Blue Sky to round out this unofficial trilogy a few months later with Epic, their take on The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs. Joyce, who was also a prominent figure within the animation industry, having worked as a designer for Pixar's early features and a producer for Blue Sky's Robots (2005), had a finger in all three pies, serving as an executive producer for the Disney and DreamWorks entries and a screenwriter and production designer for Epic. A little project I've decided to set myself for 2025 is to provide a full retrospective of all three films, considering not only how they handle the themes and spirit of Joyce's works, but also the personal stamp that each studio managed to bring to the production. I'll admit to having a soft spot for this unsung triad; they basically all came and went, leaving nary a dent in zeitgeist, but stand out to me now as underrated examples of their respective studio's output, each very worthy of a revisit.

We'll be starting this retrospective with Epic - which was, chronologically, the last of the three to see the light of day, but this is a case where I'm allowing the seasons to dictate my ordering. Epic feels the most appropriate to be exploring during the transitional period between spring and summer, when the greenery is lush and the outside world is fully in bloom (the film is, specifically, set at the summer solstice, but I'm sure I can be forgiven for getting in a few weeks ahead). Meet The Robinsons, with its emphasis on overcoming regret and anticipating what the future will hold, seems better suited for the wistful days of a waning summer. The Rise of The Guardians technically takes place at Easter, but it so wants to be a Christmas movie and, as far as popular perception is concerned, it is a Christmas movie, so it can wait until the year is nearly through.

Besides, I have been wanting to get it off my chest for some time just how much I miss Blue Sky, now that they've been consigned to the Hollywood history books. They were not my favourite animation studio. I suspect they were the favourite of very few people, possessing neither the prestige of Pixar, the subversiveness of DreamWorks or Illumination's canniness in conceiving the most prolifically, nefariously merchandisable of characters. They were there, and they were relatively consistent, churning out Ice Age films on a regular basis, and projects that were generally pleasant, if unremarkable. It was easy to take them for granted. And yet when their closure was announced in April 2021, I and a lot of other animation fans felt very melancholic about the news. Just knowing that we'd lost a major voice in Hollywood animation felt like such a massive blow. I wouldn't say that I went as far as mourning the (ostensible) extinction of the Ice Age franchise, which I had whittled down whatever patience I had remaining by its fourth installment, but I couldn't help but wonder about all of the other stories the studio might have told, and what new talent and direction could eventually have emerged that we would now never get to see in this timeline. In truth, the writing had already been on the wall for Blue Sky, as soon as their overlords at 20th Century Fox where acquired by Disney. The official explanation for the closure was that COVID-19 had made the studio's operations unsustainable, but even in late 2017, when the acquisition process was in its early stages, I remember there being a lot of speculation as to whether Disney would have sufficient interest in keeping Blue Sky going. They weren't exactly starving for animated output, and Blue Sky had spent much of the late 2010s struggling to find a money maker as reliable as the Ice Age franchise (which itself was beginning to show signs of diminishing financial returns with the fifth installment). Some might look on the development as the Circle of Life at its most unrelentingly brutal, as according to one of the testimonies in Dan Lund's 2005 documentary Dream On, Silly Dreamer, it was the overnight success of Blue Sky and the first Ice Age in 2002 that convinced the heads of Walt Disney Feature Animation to pull the plug on traditional animation. Blue Sky were, at one time, considered a threat by Disney. They played their part in redefining the course of Hollywood animation, only for Disney to ultimately claw its way back to the top, get itself into a position of authority over their former adversaries and to neutralise them without mercy.  As things stand, Annapurna Animation, which was founded by Blue Sky executives Robert L. Baird and Andrew Millstein in 2022, looks set to become their successor, their first release being Nimona (2023), a production previously scrapped under Disney's rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demise of Blue Sky wasn't enough to keep those pesky Ice Age critters from coming back - a spin-off film, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, dropped on Disney+ in 2022 (sans most of the original voice cast) and Ice Age 6 has since been confirmed, but that's all Disney's bugbear now.

Let's go back to May of 2013, when all that drama was still a number of years away, and Epic was the freshest entry into Blue Sky's canon. The film had been in gestation since as far back as 2006 and at one point had apparently come very close to moving over to Pixar (now that would have been an interesting turn of events, especially given Pixar's otherwise total avoidance of doing adaptations, unless you want to count A Bug's Life as an adaptation of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant). It pulled in decent enough numbers at the box office, but nothing that was likely to convince the studio to abandon Ice Age in favour of a Leaf Man franchise, and reviews fell largely within the lukewarm range. I confess that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it at the time. But there is something about it that intrigues me, and over the years it has slowly grown on me. In fact, I might even go so far as to call it the best of Blue Sky's output. That might be a contentious opinion, since I reckon a lot of people would argue that The Peanuts Movie (2015) is where they peaked. And yes, The Peanuts Movie is a very sweet and warm and loving tribute to the characters of Charles M. Schulz, but here's the thing - if I want to spend time with Charlie Brown and friends, I'm still far more likely to watch the TV specials. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a peculiar hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its imperfections just make me all the more obsessed with trying to narrow down what works for me about it.

Children's picture books don't always make the most auspicious starting point for feature storytelling. Consider Hollywood's chequered history of bringing the works of Dr Seuss to the big screen (Blue Sky's own attempt, Horton Hears A Who, is broadly considered one of the better examples, if not exactly a classic). The recurring challenge tends to be that picture books don't have sufficient plot to fill up feature length, so you have to add a lot of extra detail and narrative fussiness to stories that were originally designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books are enchanting examples of visual storytelling, and it stands to reason that a filmmaking creative might be inspired to want to recreate a bit of that visual verve on a cinematic canvas. The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs is also a much more plot-driven picture book than A Day With Wilbur Robinson, so in theory Blue Sky should have had the advantage over Disney here. Let's dig in and see how they did.

 

What is the book about?

Published in 1996, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs tells the story of an elderly woman who loves her garden and recalls it being a place where magical things occurred in her childhood, although her memories are hazy as to the finer details. One day the woman falls ill, and her favourite item within the garden, a rosebush, begins to decline along with her. The grief of the woman's grandchildren is paralleled with that of the bugs who live in the garden and fear for the bush's future. A small metal toy that has lain lost in the garden for many years advises them to summon a legendary band of creatures known as the Leaf Men; to do so, they must ascend to the top of the tallest tree just as the full moon touches its topmost branch. A guild of doodlebugs (woodlice) makes the daring climb, and is opposed en route by the malicious Spider Queen and her ant minions, but manage to summon the Leaf Men, who defeat the Spider Queen. They then restore the rosebush to health and carry the Long-Lost Toy to the bedridden woman, along with one of the flowers from the bush. The woman is suddenly hit with a flood of memories, recalling that the toy and the rosebush were gifts from each of her parents as tokens of how they would always love and protect her. The woman recovers from her illness, and shares with her grandchildren the stories her parents told her in her childhood about the Leaf Men who lived in the garden and watched over it. Her grandson asks if the stories are true; the woman responds: "Things may come and things may go. But never forget - the garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night." The final illustration shows the bugs standing around a framed photograph of the woman as a small child, planting the rosebush with her parents. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joyce's friend John, described as his "brave, best pal".

 

How much of this is in the feature adaptation?

Not a lot. At this point I should highlight that the source story is specifically credited in Epic as the inspiration for the Leafmen characters ("Leafmen" being the stylisation the film prefers), which in itself is very telling. They are the only participants from Joyce's pages to have recognisably survived the transition to Hollywood blockbuster. Gone are the woman and her grandchildren, the doodlebugs, the Spider Queen, the ant goblins and the Long-Lost Toy.

Instead, the plot of Blue Sky's film focusses on the teenaged MK (voice of Amanda Seyfried), who following the death of her mother has returned to the home of her estranged father, Professor Radcliffe Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), an eccentric scientist attempting to prove the existence of a race of tiny humanoids in the local forest. MK takes one look at his research, decides that he's a lunatic and she should scarper, only to get shrunken down and caught up in the ongoing conflict between the very real Leafmen, promoters of life and growth within the forest, led by the hard-headed Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the sinister forces of decomposition, the Boggans, led by the smarmy Mandrake (Christop Waltz). The forest's ruler, floral being Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles), has just selected the pod set to bloom into her equally benevolent successor - but should the pod fall into Mandrake's hands, it will become corrupted, and the seed of the forest's inevitable destruction.

Director Chris Wedge called Joyce's original story "wonderful" but also "quaint", and cited Star Wars as the narrative the film more closely resembled. Between this film and Pixar's Lightyear, I am starting to think that it's maybe not such a great sign when an animated feature (or any type of feature) claims that it's specifically out to replicate the scale and feeling of Star Wars. Star Wars was one of those real lightning-in-a-bottle successes that Hollywood has been trying to emulate since the film's release in 1977, and learned many times over that it can't be done on demand. Still, in Epic's case, there is a certain poetic charm in the comparison. Star Wars was all about looking out to the galaxies beyond and wondering what kinds of vast, sweeping stories they could accommodate. Epic is about looking inward, at our own world, and wondering what kinds of similarly vast, sweeping stories might be happening on a microscopic level beneath our feet. There is plenty of magic, it argues, in the blades of grass growing beside our own doorstep, a view that is not out of step with the final assertion of Joyce's book. The Star Wars influence broadly manifests in the re-envisioning of the premise as a larger-scale struggle between forces of good and evil, but is at its most salient during a bird-racing sequence that seems consciously designed as a homage to the infamous pod race in The Phantom Menace (1999). Otherwise, comparisons feel more apt with Bill Kroyer's traditionally animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), another tale of a shrunken human accommodated by a race of tiny magical beings within a threatened forest.

Of the three Joyce feature adaptations, Epic is also notable for having the title that's furthest removed from its source material. The film's working title had been Leaf Men, and the decision to change it to Epic was apparently forced on the production by Fox's marketing department, to Wedge's chagrin (I do not blame him; Epic is a silly title). I can only assume that this was done in response to Disney's early-2010s love affair with vague, one-word titles designed to be snappy and to conceal any whiff of fairy tale quaintness (see Tangled, Brave, Frozen and the cancelled Gigantic).

 

 Where does Epic falter?

The translation from book to feature was an evidently uneasy one - there are five credited writers (including Joyce himself), a sign that it underwent multiple rewrites - with a finished production that feels like it's pulling in a myriad of directions. I can feel Blue Sky really wanting to grow and mature as a studio through this project. Wacky buddy comedies with talking animals were their bread and butter for most of their lifespan, so I did appreciate the attempt to craft a story with a noticeably more serious sense of adventure and mythology. Old habits die hard, however, and Epic isn't the radical break from the studio's formula it might have been. The anthropomorphic minibeasts, though a part of Joyce's original story, muddle the world-building and mostly lower the tone (the non-anthropomorphic creatures, by contrast, are brought to life with flair and majesty, particularly a mouse that's able to be both adorable and wickedly threatening in the same sequence). The comic relief molluscs, Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd), are very typical Blue Sky characters, heavily reminiscent of the possum duo from the Ice Age series, and so functionally useless as to suggest that they were worked in very late into the drafting process. The worst offender by far is an amphibian bookie voiced by Pitbull, whose screen presence proves mercifully minor. Every last detail about this character - his dialogue, his demeanor, his design, his wardrobe - marks him out as egregiously out of place within this world, and better suited to one of those "hip" and "modern" Beatrix Potter "adaptations" that weren't so far on the horizon.

Something else that I suspect was compromised between drafts are the environmental themes that go hand-in-hand with this kind of setting, and feel frequently as though they're on the tip of the movie's tongue, only for it to pull back and play things entirely safe. The environmental themes in FernGully: The Last Rainforest are often criticised for being too broad and on the nose, but at the very least that film was entirely confident in what it intended to say through those themes. It's a cautionary story about humankind's sense of disconnect from the natural world, something that's challenged through the absorption of a man into a hidden world and his coming to see the consequences of his actions from a new perspective. As an eco-narrative, Epic seems hesitant to say anything much bolder than that the forest is good, and maybe mysterious. It's not that its environmental themes are more subtle than that those of FernGully - more that they've been watered down to the point where they're barely present and, at times, barely coherent. We're told early on that, at its purest, the conflict between the Leafman and the Boggans constitutes a "balance", implying that both sides are playing a vital role in maintaining the forest, and that they might do well to look past their enmity and see their interactions as a form of as cooperation. This makes sense when we consider that decay is part of the process through which life is perpetuated. But it's belied through the depiction of one side as inherently good (identified as such in the opening narration) and the other as innately evil. The Star Wars model of a light side and a dark side seems curiously misapplied to the natural order.

But, enough carping. I've already established that Epic is no masterpiece, but I do think that it also has a lot going for it. The reason why it's has grown on me, particularly in the years since Blue Sky's closure, is that it is the picture that best exemplifies why I was so saddened to see them go. They were a studio that had the potential to grow into something much greater. They never quite got there, but you can see the glimmers of ambition and adroitness in this production. It's an incredibly good-looking film (there is a slight stiffness to some of the humanoid characters, but my god is that foliage to die for) and it takes itself and its world seriously whenever those molluscs and the (Pit)bullfrog aren't the focus. And for as little DNA from Joyce's book appears to survive in the final product, the hearts of the respective stories really aren't in such disparate places. There are themes from The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs that Epic carries over and recontextualises very ably into its revised setting.

 

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs REALLY about?

Nestled in Joyce's quaint story of brave bugs and arboreal soldiers is an implicit message about death, loss and renewal. The woman's parents are presumably long-departed, but we see how they have continued to be an active part of her life through her relationship with her garden, the items that were tokens of her parents' devotion and the memories they created together. The Long-Lost Toy (aka the Metal Man), a gift from her father, represents a connection to childhood innocence that was not gone for good but lying dormant all this time, waiting to be rediscovered. The rosebush that was planted by her mother gives life and comfort but requires nurturing in return (much like Mother Nature) - when the woman falls ill and is unable to care for it, the bush shrivels, threatening the creatures that depend on it. The triumph of the doodlebugs and the Leaf Men over the Spider Queen is the triumph of hope and resilience against the forces of despair. The fate of the garden is linked to the fate of the woman, but at the end of the story we see her pass the baton to the incoming generation by telling her grandchildren of her parents' legacy, through the gifts they left behind and their stories of the Leaf Men who continue to watch over the garden. The inevitability of death is evoked in the woman's reflection that "Things may come and things may go," but the garden is upheld as a constant in which wonderful things may continue to happen. This ongoing cycle of parental (and grandparental) reassurance is intertwined with the broader cycle of life, with the natural world becoming a site in which youthful imagination and wonder may remain forever active. It is a connection to the past that sustains the present while holding the seeds for the future, and much like the memories of our departed loved ones, requires that we cherish and tend to it for it to remain fresh and thriving.

 

And how much of this is in Epic?

At heart, Epic is not fundamentally a story about tiny people who live in the forest and battle pint-sized decay-spreading demons. All of that action adventure stuff is really window dressing to a story about a father and daughter re-establishing communication after years of silence and coming to terms with their mutual grief for the absent mother. It's the scenes in Bomba's abode, focusing on the interactions between the our two human participants, that I specifically find the most earnestly intriguing. Bomba is, incidentally, the film's strongest character, not least because his character design is the most distinctively Joyce-esque.

The initial interplay between MK and Bomba establishes that communication between both parties is totally defunct. MK does not take Bomba up on his offer of discussing her bereavement, insisting that she is working through it on her own terms. And Bomba in turn does not pay due attention to MK when she attempts to raise the possibility that she might do better to live independently. When the shrunken MK later returns to the house and attempts, in vain, to gain her father's attention, very little has effectively changed, with Bomba still failing to grasp what is right under his nose because his sights are focussed in the wrong direction. Bomba has dedicated years to a fruitless hunt for the legendary Leafmen, peering at the world by way of the assorted surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed around the area, revealing to him only leaves and hummingbirds (we discover that the Leafmen are well aware of this "stomper" on their trail, and have been purposely misdirecting him this whole time). There transpires to have been a hidden agenda to this seemingly psychotic preoccupation - Bomba later admits to MK that he became increasingly subsumed in his study of the Leafmen because he'd hoped that if he proved their existence it would bring her mother back to him (an end goal that was ultimately more delusional than his belief in the Leafmen). This obsession with a past that's already slipped him by has merely impeded his ability to take advantage of what is there for him in the present, allowing his relationship with his daughter to grow distant and stagnant in a way that's contrary to his desire to salvage the family he's thoroughly alienated. At one point, MK calls him out for being so fixated on taking advantage of every given opportunity to scout out the Leafmen that he misses an opportunity to be there for her as a father.

A prevalent theme of loss runs all throughout Epic, with most of the main characters grappling with some form of personal bereavement (this theme becomes all the more palpable with the knowledge that MK, or Mary Katherine, was named after Joyce's own daughter, who sadly passed away in 2010). Nod (Josh Hutcherson), the brash young leafman with eyes for MK, was taken under the wing of Ronin after the death of his biological father. Ronin suffers his own loss when Queen Tara, his long-running love interest, is fatally wounded protecting the pod (like MK, however, he chooses to keep his emotions bottled). Even the evil Boggans are not immune to feelings of grief. Adding a little dimension to Mandrake's villainy is that he is himself in mourning for his son and general Dagda (Blake Anderson), who is killed in an early confrontation with the Leafmen. Part of his motivation for seizing control of the pod is that he sees it as a way of regaining the heir that was taken from him. A very paternal figure, his quest becomes a darker echo of Bomba's objective of obtaining proof of the Leafmen in order to regain his lost life; both are scenarios in which destruction will invariably follow.

What MK and Bomba have in common is that both are alone in the world. Bomba has spent the last decade or so being shunned professionally and familially for devoting all of his time and energy to his crackpot research project, while MK has just lost her caregiver and emotional bedrock and been consigned to a man who is effectively a stranger to her. They spend the narrative in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a beautiful but remote wilderness that emphasises their sense of separation from anything beyond themselves, not least one another. There is, notably, only one other human character seen in the entire 102 minute runtime, that being the taxi driver (Judah Friedlander) who drops MK off at her new abode and promptly high tails it out of there. Bomba is absorbed in the Leafmen's domain in a figurative sense, lost in his aspirations of finding vindication and recovery within. MK's literal absorption, meanwhile, becomes a metaphor for her having to navigate through a big and overwhelming world in which she is seemingly all on her own, unable to make herself heard and at constant risk of being devoured whole. She finds solidarity in the Leafmen, who introduce her to their philosophy of "Many leaves, one tree", by which all things are connected and each individual becomes valuable in relation to a bigger picture. This is challenged by Mandrake, who proposes that the tree is ultimately indifferent to the fate of the individual leaf, pointing out that, "In the end, every leaf falls and dies alone". Mandrake gives a menacing voice to MK's feelings of parental abandonment, while the Leafmen, whose final display of unity is enough to decisively thwart the king of decay, become proxies for familial devotion, reaffirming the same sense of enduring parental security as they did in Joyce's book. The symbolism of nature as a force that nurtures and sustains us all is also discernible.

The rosebush and the Metal Man do not feature in the film, but there is a character who serves as a kind of equivalent to both, in the form of Ozzy, the three-legged, one-eyed pug who was the Bomba family's pet during their time of unity, and was left with the professor when MK and her mother moved out. Quite how long MK has spent apart from her father is not established, but it's clearly longer than the average pug's lifespan - on arriving at her father's home, MK is vocally surprised to be greeted by Ozzy and to discover that her childhood pet is still alive. The dog is a connection to a more innocent past, and an indication that her bond with her father is not as dead in the water as she assumes; Ozzy's battered physique reflects the damage inflicted on their relationship by their time apart, but his amazing vitality offers reassurance that their underlying love has ultimately endured. A photograph showing the young MK with her parents and Ozzy as a puppy features a couple of times in the story, echoing the photograph illustration seen at the end of Joyce's book. Ozzy's movements and actions often anticipate Bomba's, indicating that he functions as an extension of her father; he becomes an inadvertent threat to the shrunken MK right before Bomba unwittingly creates trouble for her, and he later saves MK from a Boggan, prefacing Bomba's coming to her aid at a crucial moment in the climax.

By the end of the film, MK and Bomba have succeeded in overcoming the hurdles that have prevented them from efficiently communicating. MK finds a way to let her father in on her location, by repositioning a thumb tack on his map of the forest, while Bomba is able to use the technology he's honed during his pursuit of the Leafmen to make MK intelligible to his ears. By the time MK has been restored to her proper size, she and her father are now firmly on the same page. The wilderness that once reflected their mutual isolation becomes a source of open affinity, with MK able to freely resume her dialogue with Nod via the surveillance monitors, mirroring the open communication she now enjoys with her father. Whether Bomba can get the wider scientific community on board with his latest findings now that he has his daughter to back him up is irrelevant - what matters is that the study of the Leafmen, a once contentious topic that kept them at odds, is now a means for them to grow and learn together. We leave with them racing out enthusiastically into the woods, eager to bond more with their diminutive friends.

One criticism I do have of how Epic handles the theme of loss, compared to its source material, is that the deceased mother is never fleshed out in a way that causes her to feel like anything other than a plot device. We don't learn anything about her other than the most obvious details needed to kick the conflict into gear - ie: that she was close to MK and disapproved of her husband's research. The parents in The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs were never seen in the flesh, but had a distinct presence via the components of the garden and the memories the woman had created therein; you felt as though you knew so much about their relationship and they ways in which they were still being felt just by glancing at that poignant illustration of the Metal Man and the rose in her hand. Epic would have benefited from giving us at least a little more flavour of who MK's mother was, perhaps through an item of her own that she'd left behind at the house. But as a story about mending broken bridges and finding your way back into a kinship thought long-lost, it really is quite lovely. That we may perceive in it an expression of Joyce's own desire to reconnect with the real Mary Katherine makes it all the more poignant, and genuine.

In addition, I really do love that entire sequence with the predatory mouse. It so neatly exploits the fact that, when you view a mouse or rat's head from the underside, it does kind of resemble a shark.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (aka This Is The Real World, 1988)

I can only imagine what it would be like to stumble blindly upon Vincent Ward's 1988 film The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, without knowing the big narrative trick that occurs a third of the way through. I'm not convinced that would be an easy endeavor - it's not as though it was treated as a secret from a marketing standpoint, with the trailers, promotional posters and taglines making it abundantly obvious where this particular medieval odyssey was headed. If you happened to catch the film while channel-surfing then you might have had more success...but only if you tuned in after the opening titles, which in television broadcasts reportedly came with onscreen warning not to adjust your set or be startled by the precursory sequences in black and white. Colour, viewers were assured, was eventually coming...and so was modernity. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is a time travel story, a point that was always used to draw in audiences, not to catch them off guard after first enticing them with the medieval setting promised in the subtitle (which for some releases even was swapped out for "A Time-Travel Adventure", making it as explicit as could be). From a commercial perspective, this makes perfect sense - the runaway success of Back To The Future just three years prior indicated that there was a great market for time-hopping adventures, while the sombre period drama that opens Ward's picture would likely have struggled to suffice as a hook in itself. But from a narrative view, it seems a shame. Ward's film is so artfully structured, and feels consciously designed to have blown its audience's minds with its sudden foray into the Twilight Zone (the episode "A Hundred Yards Over The Rim" was a possible influence on Ward). Fortunately, The Navigator is one of those films that really cannot be spoiled simply by divulging a few key plot details in advance. The mere knowledge that it takes a sharp turn from murky medieval drama into science-fiction romp does not prepare you for what an absolute thrill ride it is on an aesthetic and atmospheric level. The best way to describe it is that it subjects the viewer to the ambience of a dream within a dream, immersing us first in one terrifying nightmare scenario (cold, claustrophobic and marked by a sense of impending dread) before pushing us out into quite another (expansive, head-spinning and filled with strange and immediate dangers).

Our story opens in England, in the year 1348. Europe has been ravaged by the Black Death, but for now this is still all a distant rumble to our protagonists, the denizens of an isolated mining community in Cumbria. They've heard word of a symptom that signals imminent death, the development of a pus-filled boil in the armpit. They're also disturbed that one of their party, the wanderlusting Connor (Bruce Lyons) has journeyed out of the village and been absent for longer than expected. Meanwhile, Connor's younger brother Griffin (Hamish McFarlane), a child with second sight, is experiencing strange visions involving an underground pit and a church spire. Eventually Connor returns, although he brings little good news, having witnessed first-hand how the plague has devastated communities all over the land, and knowing that its advancement upon their village is all but inevitable. There is preliminary talk about embarking on pilgrimage to a big church in a distant city, with the aspiration of gaining divine protection with an offering, but when refugees from an eastern community pass by with signs of infection, the villagers fear that it is already too late, and that they will have started to succumb by sunrise. Their last remaining hope lies with Griffin, who believes that his visions indicate a geographical shortcut; there is a tunnel in the earth that will lead them to a great church in the furthermost regions of the world, and if they are able to erect a Cumbrian cross upon its spire before the night is through, they might convince God to spare them. Griffin sets out with Connor and four other men - the eternally po-faced Searle (Marshall Napier), the genial Martin (Paul Livingston), the thieving Arno (Chris Haywood) and the timid, guileless Ulf (Noel Appleby), the last of whom has brought along offering of his own, a wooden craving of the Virgin Mary that he intends to place in the church as a tribute to his deceased mother. Our six plucky pilgrims burrow into the earth, and eventually emerge on the other side, to be greeted by a dazzling city of light. Unbeknownst to them, they are now in Auckland^[1], New Zealand, and the year is 1988. The past may be in black and white, but the future (the present) exists in glorious (albeit nocturnal) colour.

The most obvious comparison here would be The Wizard of Oz (1939), which used a similar visual trick in presenting the Kansas-based bookends in sepia and the adventures in Oz in Technicolor. The Kansas sequences are coded as the "real world" because they are more grounded (at least until the tornado strikes), but have a colourless drudgery that suggests a world not fully awake and in tune with its potential. The result is a kind of dual unreality - we might say that Kansas itself plays like a dream, but a flatter, hazier dream that can only come into being while the vibrant, larger than life Oz is lying dormant. In Ward's film, the black and white opening imposes a similar disconnect - the middle ages are a distant, unfamiliar world submerged in a bleakness so unspeakable as to seem incomprehensible to modern viewers. There is, nevertheless, a great humanity that emerges from this desolation. The characters - Griffin, Connor, Ulf, Arno and their company - have distinct personalities and a clear affinity. They are affable and entirely relatable. We might not feel so at ease being immersed in this world, but we have little difficulty in empathising with its inhabitants. We become so aligned with these characters that when we finally arrive in 20th-century Auckland, we experience it through their eyes, as a sprawling, dazzling onslaught of light and colour. As with The Wizard of Oz we end up with a dual unreality, although in this case it is the world that is ostensibly familiar and mundane that becomes the larger than life fantasy, every bit as grand and impressive as the fairy tale world of Oz. The pilgrims are overwhelmed by its beauty, declaring it to be God's own city, but are also filled with questions about the practical ramifications of such a place -wondering, for example, how much tallow would be required to keep so many lights ablaze. The city is beyond their comprehension, and yet these pilgrims are not fools, approaching the foreign metropolis with a keenness and a desire to assess and make sense of what they see.

It isn't long before this gleaming light show is exposed as a region of unforeseen peril. Ulf, lured by the splendor of the vehicle headlights, wanders into a highway and narrowly avoids being knocked down by incoming traffic. He is left so shaken by the experience that he is subsequently unable to cross with the others, forcing them to leave him behind as they venture into the city. It is in Ulf's traumatic encounter that we find the most palpable echoes of the real-life experience that reportedly inspired Ward to make the film, when he attempted to cross a German autobahn and got stuck in the middle. He came to the realisation that there was plenty of terror lurking in the banalities of modern living, and envisioned an adventure in which these were the dragons to be overcome by explorers from another time. Auckland entails no shortage of nightmarish run-ins, but they are nightmarish in ways that recall the morbid mundaneness of the public information film, as experienced through the eyes of the ingenuous (and interwoven with a few surreal touches lifted directly from cartoons, such as when Connor takes a mouth-contorting ride on the city's train system). The pilgrims discover the potentially deadly hazards that come with crossing roads, trespassing on construction sites and lingering around railway lines, evoking the memory of what it was like to have fears of these things instilled in you as a child, and the sensation that these are not modern miracles to be marvelled at, but omnipresent hazards that give catastrophe endless openings from which to strike. It is not surprising that Ulf, a more innocent and childlike figure than the actual child of the group, forever clutching his wooden Virgin as both a comforting toy and a mother substitute, decides that this world is more than he can bear at the very first hurdle.

20th-century Auckland feels notably less human than 14th-century Cumbria, with technology having displaced nature, dominating a landscape in which people seem largely absent or indistinct. The vehicles race by like stampeding beasts, their occupants seemingly indifferent to the pilgrims. When Connor, who insists on separating himself from the rest of the group and locating the church on his own, wanders across a patch of rubble, he finds a crane descending on him that looks uncannily like a monstrous spider. A nuclear submarine surfacing in the harbour is perceived as an attacking leviathan (the reality, as we'll see below, is considerably more ominous). The city is not entirely without its human side, however. The pilgrims find all-important allies in the employees of a modern foundry, led by the benevolent Smithy, played by Desmond Kelly (the only Aucklander outside the foundry to have any degree of significant dialogue is the man from whom the pilgrims "borrow" a horse to use as a winch). Neither party ever quite figures out that their new friends are from another time, with Smithy and his crew being at first bemused by the appearance of the pilgrims, but arriving at the conclusion that they are out-of-towners who have "spent too much time in the bush". In truth, they have little difficulty connecting with these eccentric travellers because they are their modern counterparts, awaiting destruction of a different kind in the form of the "wreckers" set to call on the foundry in the morning to put them out of business. We might connect these unseen "wreckers" to the menacing construction devices encountered by Connor, indicating that these men are as out of their depth as the pilgrims in a world of impersonal and relentless urbanisation. The most pronounced difference between the two bands is the modern crew's lack of religious sentiment. Smithy explains that a local church had previously commissioned a cross of their own, but their preparations had come to naught because the church was unable to produce the necessary funds. Martin is shocked by the implications - "The church is poor?" - and is just as perplexed by the crew's response that it's "like any other business...when they don't want what you're selling." Smithy is given pause when it turns out that the cross the Cumbrians want casting perfectly fits the mould they had prepared earlier, but decides that they must have come on behalf of that same church. Should we chalk this up to fate? Strange coincidence? Or might there be a more troubling explanation for why the past and the present seem so perfectly in sync?

It is only when Griffin, having become lost and separated from the others, wanders into a television shop and sees the various horrors on display on its great wall of screens, that Ward's intention in mixing the two time periods becomes starkly apparent. The first image we see is footage from a nature documentary, in which a hawk is pursuing a rabbit across desert terrain - a symbol of impending destruction that foreshadows the grim broadcast to follow on the subject of nuclear proliferation. Smithy and his companions might presently await the destruction of their personal territory with the coming of the wreckers, but there is a far greater threat hanging over them, articulated in the studio voice that declares: "This is the real world, 1988. You can isolate one little pocket of the world and say, nuclear-free. Oh, you can try. But then, there is no refuge. No pocket, no escape from the real world." The Navigator is not so much a film about the Black Death as it is about the apocalypse rearing its head within the present. It's in this statement that the significance of having the medieval travellers emerge in New Zealand (the director's nationality notwithstanding), as opposed to, say, modern-day Carlisle, becomes most pronounced. The plight of the small Cumbrian village is an allegory for the plight of New Zealand in choosing to remain nuclear-free in a world dominated by overwhelming nuclear tension. This 20th-century apocalypse isn't restricted to the terrors of the A-bomb, with plagues and vulnerability to disease remaining as much a reality as they did in the 14th century. The spectre of Death materialises in the form of the Grim Reaper, hurling bowling balls at defenceless humans substituting for pins, immersing us once again in the macabre aura of the public information film. The footage in question is from an Australian AIDS-awareness film, the bowling scenario being a grisly metaphor for how AIDS is a danger facing humanity as a collective, not the select groups once assumed. The film's most horrific image, in which a mother and baby, having survived the first bowl, are physically torn apart when the Reaper makes that spare, is fully discernible over Griffin's shoulder. Everyone - men, women and children of all stripes - are the terrified playthings of a force as unspeakable as it is unsparing.

Martin's prior assessment that, "if the evil was on our side, then surely God's goodness is on this one", turns out, perhaps not to our surprise, to be bogus. We are left wondering if the time barrier breach had been possible because there is so precious little to separate these two worlds. The Navigator takes an eternalist view, in which the apocalypse that loomed in the past is suggested to be effectively no different to the apocalypse that looms now. The precise nature of the threat might have shifted, but the battle against oblivion remains unchanged, as one of fundamentally fragile humans up against destructive forces inconceivably greater than themselves. This is a struggle that Searle has, on a personal level, understood all too well even before the coming of the plague, as he recounts how he has watched each of his family die off through various instances of misfortune. Significantly, Griffin's encounter with the television shop comes after a disturbing additional vision indicating that the endeavor to erect the cross upon the church spire will come at a cost, with one of the pilgrims falling to their death (he fears it will be Connor, on the basis that the doomed individual is wearing a gauntlet that only his brother possesses). The closing component of his vision shows a cloaked figure standing before a coffin that has been set adrift on a body of water, an image that eerily parallels the broadcast vision of the Reaper bowling for victims.

The question Ward's film poses is what, then, are the little people expected to do when living in the face of such all-encompassing horror? Smithy and co make it clear that the modern world has largely moved on from the kinds of action that the pilgrims would consider wholly practical solutions. Would any prospective efforts on our part to change our fate be as quixotic, in practice, as the pilgrims' attempts to keep sickness out of their village by attaching a cross to a spire on the other side of the world? Or does it take an act this quixotic, that steadfast willingness to face what feel like insurmountable odds, to inspire the action that might very well alter the course of history? At the climax of the film, once the pilgrims have reached St Patrick's Cathedral, the great church of Griffin's dreams, and begun the process of attempting to scale it to and to fix their spike to the top, we see their efforts bring out a sense of unity, in a way that totally transcends the barriers of time. Smithy and his crew show up to lend a hand, and the broader human element of the city is finally teased out of hiding, as other Aucklanders gather on the ground below to watch. They have no context for what is happening, yet are compelled to cheer the pilgrims on regardless, recognising their efforts as an act of valiant defiance. Intercut with the modern day spectators are black and white shots of the villagers left behind in the 14th-century village, awaiting the sounds of church bells to indicate the success of their adventurers. The people of both eras are now intermingled, as if their respective fates are tied up in the outcome of the pilgrims' endeavor. The coming of the brilliant sunrise signals not just their looming deadline, but the passage of time turning as it has always done, indifferent to the march of human history within its midst.

(Spoilers now follow)

The pilgrims succeed in attaching the cross to the spire before sunrise, but it turns out to be Griffin himself who takes that fateful plunge, bringing an abrupt halt to Auckland's manifestation. The fall apparently takes him back down to reality, for we find ourselves in the pits below medieval Cumbria once again, the world restored to black and white, as Griffin recounts his vision to his reunited companions. Ulf is disappointed that he missed out on the adventure, but Griffin obligingly works in an addendum, assuring Ulf that he conquered the road by digging underneath it, and was able to show the wooden Virgin the great city on the other side. He does, however, stop short of honoring Ulf's request that the Virgin make it all the way to the cathedral, as if sensing, forebodingly, some limitations in how drastically one might rewrite fate. The trip to Auckland is contextualised as "just a dream", in a manner not dissimilar to Dorothy's trip to Oz, with a final comic punchline in which the city once hailed as God's own is dismissed by Searle as "a vision of Hell." The group then hears the voices of their fellow villagers calling out to them, proclaiming that the new day has come, and nobody among them is displaying any sign of illness. But as the adventurers make their triumphant return, Griffin makes a disturbing discovery - he has developed a pus-filled boil under his arm. He confronts Connor, and finds a similar boil concealed on his throat. Connor was carrying the infection all along, having picked it up on his travels and returned with it to the village. Connor states that he was not aware he'd been infected until he was in the pit, at which point he made the effort to keep himself separate from the others. Frightened and with no other recourse, he came to believe that Griffin's vision would be his salvation. He assures Griffin that the story he shared has indeed cured with, the boil he bears being now nothing more than a scar. The other pilgrims ask if everything has been in vain, and if they will all die after all, but Griffin insists that they will not, for only one person perished in his vision. He announces that he will not return to the village, and tasks Connor with retelling his story to the villagers, for this now is the only weapon they have in their fight against oblivion: "You'll bring them round, make them believe my story! They must!" The film ends with Griffin, having been laid to rest in a wooden coffin, being set out to drift upon the waters as his companions bid him a mournful farewell.  The closing shot shows the silhouette of the cloaked Connor within the foreground, observing the departure of his deceased brother in an arrangement identical to that of Griffin's prophecy.

It is a hauntingly ambiguous ending, filled with imagery that could potentially point us to either conclusion. All of the adult travellers are standing together in a final show of unity, but do they look like a collective strength ready to take on the odds, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, or more like bowling pins waiting to be struck down by forces perpetually beyond their control? Also present for Griffin's departure is Connor's wife Linnet (Sarah Peirse), who is holding a crying baby - the seed of a possible future for the village, or a baleful echo of the mother and baby doomed to be ripped apart by the Reaper's thrust? Is out final impression of Connor that he is a protective figure who will make good on his brother's wishes, or does his shrouded form still recall the Grim Reaper, being the one who has brought the infection to his community and potentially sealed everyone's fates? Has Connor really been cured by his brother's story, and will the act of believing it also be enough to save the villagers? Is this story nothing more than a diversion, to keep its recipients from having to look their harsh reality square in the eye, or is it a stirring reminder of how they need to keep believing in themselves in order to implement change? Or are there some changes that are simply beyond their power to implement? The fate of our heroes remains uncertain, and all in a way that functions as a call to arms to Ward's viewership within the present. I mentioned at the start that the entire picture plays like a dream within a dream, although whose dream it might be would be anyone's guess. It feels, appropriately, as if the modern world has fallen asleep and had a vision of its own possible future, filtered through the ordeals of a past it thought long behind it. Does it foretell of our salvation, or of our inevitable destruction? That part of the dream is still murky.

[1] The city is never explicitly identified as Auckland, but while Ulf is digging there is a sign indicating that we are in the vicinity of Onehunga.