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 revisiting.

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 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 were 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 resurfacing - 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 has slowly worked its way into my affections. In fact, these days I might even go so far as to call it the standout 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 brainkids 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 traditionally animated television specials. It's a nice film, but by its nature kind of a redundant one. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a curious, even ludicrous hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its numerous glaring imperfections make it all the more enthralling to me. My obsession with Epic is one with trying to parse the tensions between a messy final product and an underlying maturity that feels like it was desperately trying to find its way out into the open.

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 usually 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 designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books often make for 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 graphic 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 fared.

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs 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 Epic?

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 that 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 type 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 via 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 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 slowly 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 vibrant.

 

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 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 enhance their bond 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 Garden of Écos (aka After The Gold Rush)

The hardest thing about entering into Co Hoedeman's 1997 film The Garden of Écos is the intuitive understanding, straight off the bat, that the titular paradise is not fated to last. The title, recalling the Garden of Eden, already seems telling enough, but there is something so intricate, so beautifully-realised and, above all, so guileless about Hoedeman's paper-crafted world that makes it instantly ripe for destruction. The Dutch-Canadian animator, who is best known for his Academy Award-winning 1977 short The Sand Castle, has here created something that seems at once vibrant and deeply nostalgic. The colours, the lighting and the movements of the characters are beyond resplendent; the garden feels alive and meticulously constructed as a functional ecosystem, while also being evocative of some bygone childhood dreamland, one that was always destined to fade into the stuff of faint memory the second the outside world crept in. The Garden of Écos is on one level an ecological parable, dealing with the mismanagement of natural resources and illustrating how the breakdown of one thread of the web of life can have catastrophic consequences all over. On another level it is an anti-warfare narrative, showing what happens when co-operation is displaced by conflict as an overriding value. The common teaching is that, without recognition of the interconnectivity of all things, and our dependency on a shared environment, none of us can hope to survive.

The opening two minutes depict how a typical diurnal cycle plays out in the titular garden, focussing on the various animal lifeforms that populate it and the niches they've carved out within. Many are visibly based on real-world animals, the most prominent being a family of sheep-like quadropeds, including a parent and child who function as the emotional nexus of the narrative. Other lifeforms have a surreal or fantastical twist that reinforces the intersection between familiar ecology and playful fantasy. One critter looks like a mishmash between a flightless owl and an animate cloak; another is spherical, resembling a kind of terrestrial sea urchin with a brood of sprightly golf balls constantly in tow. Hoedeman takes time to carefully establish the distinctive ways in which each of these species interacts with their environs and with one another, imbuing them with a character and vitality that is immediately endearing. Even the ones that lack obvious facial features, such as the spherical beings, are able to convey such life and personality as to engender the viewer's empathy, eg: when we see two of the smaller spheres hesitating before travelling down a ledge.

Even at its most pristine, Écos is not exactly symmetrical with Eden. Death is never entirely absent from the garden, it being a daily reality that some of its inhabitants prey on others. The buzzing yellow insects that emerge from their hive every dusk form a vital food source for a species of winged nocturnal beings that behave like bats but make distinctive bird-like calls. Meanwhile, the baby spheres are picked off by green snakes that camouflage themselves in the grasses, yet even the presence of animals who survive by devouring another's young do little to negate the overwhelming sense of peaceful equilibrium that characterises those earlier moments. There is, above all, an overarching cooperative spirit that seems to permeate the garden at all corners, even among those predatory beings - one of the snakes, upon catching a young sphere, is seen to feed it to its companion. From the start, we are primed to feel an intuitive respect for each creature's role within the scheme of things.

The inevitable upset to this balance arrives in the form of a swarm of creatures resembling something between a caterpillar and a crustacean (for simplicity's sake I'll just refer to them as "shrimps"), who raid the garden while most of its residents are sleeping and ravage the flowers on which the sheep depend. What immediately marks the shrimps out as outsiders to the garden's ethos is that they do not share in its community spirit; their tendency toward coaction does not extend beyond their own kind, and they exhibit no awareness of the bigger picture. In contrast to the sheep, who take only as much from the flowers as they need, the shrimps pick massive quantities and hoard the buds away inside a cave - the same cave in which the nocturnal avians roost during the daylight hours - for purely their own usage. Their wastefulness wreaks grisly consequences when the stockpile of picked buds begins to decompose en masse, unleashing lethal gases into the cave and poisoning the nocturnal birds. Obviously, these shrimps are a swarming disaster zone. Yet Hoedeman makes the curious but effective choice of choosing to portray the intruders, who on paper should represent the absolute worst of an unchecked culture of excess and consumption at its most rapaciously catastrophic, seem less malevolent than they do incompetent and out of their depth in a world that's clearly much bigger than their comprehension. For the purposes of this story, it is important that they come across as as fundamentally little and vulnerable as everything else in Hoedeman's world and that, much like the garden residents, all that they basically want to do is to survive (honestly, they're probably the cutest lifeforms in the picture). When the locals finally resolve to get violent with the raiders, the results are harrowing and in no way cathartic. The most disturbing aspect of the narrative trajectory is that the cooperative spirit that defines Écos, while in some respects fortified by the shrimps' invasion, does not, ultimately, prove redemptive. As a team, they remain united to the finish, yet it is their willingness to cast the shrimps as enemies and make the us and them division that proves most lethal to their garden's vitality. Écos is a tale of poisoning and how it pervades and corrupts a formerly pristine paradise, and that poisoning takes multiple different forms.

The native critters attempt to weather the hardship as a community, by gathering together the ravaged flowers, while one of the owls tries (unsuccessfully) to carry some of the poisoned birds to safety. And yet even they are not immune to the same kind of short-sightedness that facilitates the shrimps' ravenous consumption, by not considering the wider-ranging impacts of some of their own actions. Without the nocturnal birds to control their population, the buzzing insects multiply and become a nuisance to the other creatures. One of the owls discovers that squeezing a type of flower will disperse toxins into the atmosphere that kill the bugs, a seemingly resourceful innovation it shares with its neighbours, which merely furthers the proliferation of poisons around the garden. The toxins that now scatter the ground prove just as lethal to the spherical creatures, in turn rendering them inedible to the snakes. Obviously, this is analogous to the use of pesticides and their potentially catastrophic impact on the wider environment, while also symbolising the seed of animosity as it spreads its corruptive influence, finally prompting the once-peaceful garden inhabitants to declare full-blown war upon the shrimps (they do not seem naturally hardwired toward violence, their first instinct being to flee rather than fight, although they rise to the challenge when prompted), rather than attempt to reach a more amicable solution. As a survival tactic, it proves as bogus as their measure taken against the insect population, culminating in a tragedy so terrible that it stops both sides in their tracks.

The hardest thing about exiting Hoedeman's film is the deliberate lack of resolution. The dispute between the garden inhabitants and the invasive shrimps, not to mention the broader ecological problems caused by the introduction of the various toxins into the garden, remains unsolved by the fade-out. For a fleeting moment, we are teased with the possibility of peace, with all parties united in their recognition of the devastation their joint hostility has brought about. The shrimps seem as concerned by the young sheep's death as the garden's denizens; while two of them were responsible for pushing down the boulder that killed the young sheep, it looked to me like they were attempting to help the friend a snake had cornered on a lower ledge, and it is evident that the young sheep was not their intended target. That final wide shot, showing all of the survivors coming together to gaze upon the body of the crushed sheep, provides the one moment in which the sense of community that previously enabled Écos to thrive seems to extend across all barriers; neither side wanted it to end with this. The possibility of understanding is there, but alas, Hoedeman insists that it is not realised. The garden inhabitants, upon noticing the shrimps attempting to participate in the mourning process, angrily turn on them and force them to retreat, definitively denying them a place within their order. Whether the garden has seen the last of these interlopers remains up in the air, but there is no feeling of victory in their closing expulsion. The point of no return has already been crossed, with the death of the young sheep indicating the termination of any last hope of recovery, both for the garden and its inhabitants. The fallen youngster, a symbol both of innocence and of the incoming generation stifled by the shaky decisions of its elders, has been extinguished by a toxin of a different nature, one that both sides are fully culpable in proliferating through their mutual inability to share resources and see eye-to-eye. The residents of Écos have compromised themselves, and even if life within their garden is able to continue on in some form, the gentle guilelessness that once pervaded the land seems irrecoverable. Death had always existed in Écos, but by the end it has truly come to signify the snuffing out of life, and not the process by which life perpetuates itself.

Live Earth '07: Unravel (featuring Two Young Girls From Burundi)

Unravel, directed by Sarah Cox, was the shortest contribution to Aardman's Live Earth trilogy of 2007, at only 92 seconds long, although probably the most starkly harrowing in its message. Unlike its two sister installments, which both leaned heavily on the humor angle, Unravel approaches its subject with an earnest, elegant simplicity, in evoking two almost oppositional connections - the technological connections that make the world seem closer than ever from a dimensional/communicative standpoint, and the extent to which all life on Earth is inherently interconnected - and how the former, while ostensibly uniting the world, is having a disastrous effect on the latter. The Earth is depicted as a ball of yarn, with various patterns intricately interwoven into its surface, representing an assortment of plant and animal life and their corresponding habitats. A trio of aeroplanes encircle the globe, each pulling a thread behind them; we see the far-reaching impact of their movements, as the threads continue to unwind and the habitats and the chains of life they support are gradually depleted. Finally, the pulled threads reassemble to form the following words: DON'T LET IT ALL UNRAVEL.

The first observation that has to be made about Unravel is that the animation is beautiful. It is a truly enchanting piece to look at. The various figures, woven out of fabric, emit a warm, handmade quality; lush greens and blues in which everything seems alive but also delicate, all of which makes its ceaseless destruction all the more distressing. The second observation to be made is that, for as wonderful a short as it is on the visual front, it wouldn't pack half as weighty a punch without the sonic factor. The most intriguing thing going on in Unravel is the beguiling choice of audio accompaniment, credited in the closing titles to "Two Young Girls From Burundi". Rewatching it over and over, I couldn't pinpoint quite what it was about this track that made it so haunting - it seemed to convey both the beauty and the elegance of this fragile world but there was a cry of despair in it too. It felt like the rhythm of the Earth, a hum or a heartbeat, desperately trying to preserve as the odds grew increasingly stacked against it. I went in search of this recording in the hopes of gaining greater context, and eventually managed to locate it on an LP, An Introduction To Africa, released by WOMAD in 1985. There's no specific information on who the two young girls really were - their names and their stories remain a mystery - but the accompanying booklet had this to say about the nature of the song:

"On this opening track, two young Burundi girls sing Akazéhé which is a song of greeting. This type of song is recited everywhere - from large celebrations to when people visit each others homes. This style of singing is not only common to Burundi, but can be found all over Africa. It requires a highly accurate breathing technique as there is little room for pause. This song, recorded in 1968, displays the curious ululating voices which create a polyphonic effect."

It seems that this recording was culled from an earlier release, Musique Du Burundi, put out by Ocora records in 1968, in which the girls are credited under their French moniker, Deux Jeunes Filles. There, it's preceded by an Akazéhé from just one girl, which itself sounds strangely familiar; I can only presume that it was incorporated into some Deep Forest remix.

What is it about the recording that makes it so powerful in this particular context? The knowledge that the song in question is a greeting certainly makes it all the more ironic that it accompanies images of life being slowly erased. But I think it also has to do with the song's unassuming nature, and the anonymity of these two small (yet compelling) voices, calling out from a planet where everything is ultimately interlinked. They become the vitality, and the helplessness, of every individual living thing adding up to one.

Live Earth - Unravel a from dg andson on Vimeo.

Live Earth '07: Gridlock (aka We're All In A Flippin' Jam)

On 07/07/07, a series of benefit concerts was held across the globe under the banner of Live Earth, with the intention of raising money and awareness for the battle against climate change (following a similar model to the Live 8 concerts that had been held a couple of years prior) - an event that I think now is largely remembered, at least to those who saw the Wembley concert, for the controversy generated when Phil Collins sang "Invisible Touch" with colourful new lyrics. But there was also some interesting stuff happening on the animation front, with Aardman Animations having been commissioned to make a series of environmentally-themed shorts to screen in between footage of bands performing. A total of three shorts were produced, Can One Person Make A Difference?, Gridlock and Unravel, none of which were even half as traumatic as that Turtle Journey film Aardman made for Greenpeace in 2020, but hopefully they still helped in getting the message across. Of the trio, Gridlock was the only one that dipped into Aardman's well of established characters, by having Angry Kid weigh in on the problem of traffic pollution.

Angry Kid, a strong contender for the title of least cuddly Aardman creation, was the brainchild of Darren Walsh (who also provides the voice of the titular character) and took an irreverent, puckishly grotesque look at teenage angst, curiosity and alienation. In a nutshell, it's best recommended to viewers who thought that Kevin The Teenager was an inspired caricature, but too genteel. It follows the adventures of a snot-nosed (literally and figuratively) adolescent brat with a cocky inquisitiveness and a vulgar, somewhat twisted sense of humor. A large number of  shorts involve Angry Kid coming to blows with his Dad, who is frequently heard (voice courtesy of David Holt) but always stays out of the camera's view; he gets understandably exasperated with his son's awkward questioning and behaviours, but his periodically vindictive reactions suggest that Angry Kid's mean streak could well be genetic. Other shorts involve Angry Kid tormenting his younger sibling, Lil' Sis, who is regularly able to one-up him, and his best friend/chew toy, Speccy, who isn't. The series had a unique, distinctly off-kilter look thanks to its complex production - originally, Angry Kid was brought to life through the process of pixilation, with a live action actor swapping out masks in between frames, while Lil' Sis and Speccy were portrayed by life-size puppets. It would be wrong to suggest that pixilation is inherently ill-suited to whimsy (A Chairy Tale, by Canadian film-makers Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra, is pretty firm evidence to the contrary), but there is nevertheless something so much more uncanny about the results than regular stop motion (note: later installments forgo the mask process and use CGI to animate the characters' faces, which pulls off the incredible feat of looking even more unsettling while perhaps lacking the same degree of personality). Unlike Rex The Runt, which wound up being pitched to essentially the wrong audience when it debuted, I don't think you were likely to mistake Angry Kid for anything overly kid-friendly. It looked way too nightmarish from the outset - a quality that made it perfectly apt for delivering a cautionary tale about the planet being taken down a drastically wrong path. If there's an Aardman property that nails down the messy self-destructiveness of the human condition, it's Angry Kid.

By 2007, Angry Kid's grisly features were a familiar sight among animation fans wont to straying from the beaten track, with two series and a 23-minute special under his belt. This latest installment, Gridlock, saw Angry Kid and the rest of the cast recount the experience of being trapped in a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions...in song form. Gridlock is a full-blown music video, pivoting on a pop-rap comedy number that, much to my chagrin, was not actually released as a single in any form. Not even a crummy download. Although, oddly enough, Angry Kid had only released a record the year prior, "Handbags", another pop-rap comedy number that was ostensibly about some amalgamation of football and handbag-wielding but was (I presume) all a metaphor for masturbation. I happen to think that "Gridlock" was better. When you hear it, you'll understand why I'm so bummed that it didn't strive for greater exposure - it is gloriously infectuous. Most of the rapping is provided by Angry Kid himself, although Lil' Sis, who seldom speaks at all in the series proper, here gets a surprisingly generous number of lines, courtesy of Beth Chalmers.

Gridlock uses the series' then-trademark combination of live action, pixilation and puppetry (and some 2D animation) to create a disorientating picture of the world going to Hell as viewed from the backseat of your daddy's car. It's unsparing in its depiction of the uncomfortable realities of road travel, and there's a harrowing moment with an asthmatic Speccy facing the build-up of exhaust fumes, although the eco themes become most explicit in the final verse, when Angry Kid references the looming climate catastrophe: "Now I've been told/Soon it won't be cold/Can't wait, I'm gonna buy a ton of lotion." Which sounded like a farcically bone-headed response to the environmental crisis, until that horrifying day when we woke up and discovered that Angry Kid and people of his mentality were now running BBC Bitesize. At the end, he concedes that, "We should have heard the boffins and their warning", but professes that he's enjoying the calamity of seeing the world come apart at the seams (a metaphor evoked directly in one of its sister shorts, Unravel). He scoots off through a smoggy playground where the children are decked out in gas masks, before finally getting his comeuppance via the wrath of Dad.

There are obvious visual nods throughout to Bob Dylan's proto music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues", but overall I'm tempted to theorize that Walsh set out to create an inversion on the music video to R.E.M's 1992 single "Everybody Hurts", which also involved a traffic jam and climaxed with all of the occupants abandoning their vehicles and walking away in unison. Gridlock takes things in a slightly different direction, with everybody leaving their vehicles and turning on one another in their carbon-addled rage - which, in all honesty, seems like a much more credible outcome. More than just the story of a bog standard traffic jam, doesn't the whole thing play like a convincing metaphor for the Earth teetering over the brink of catastrophe? Congested, stinking and with nowhere else to go, odds are that we won't be feeling a whole lot of patience or empathy for one another.

Blinky Bill's White Christmas (2005)

Flashback to 1992, and there were major changes in the air for the Australian animation squad at Yoram Gross Film Studio. To date, their legacy had been largely founded on a series of films chronicling the adventures of Dot, a heroic young girl with the ability to converse with animals, but the studio were thinking about retiring Dot (who received her final feature outing in 1994) and were eagerly in search of a new signature character to lead them toward the modern age of the approaching millennium. They found it in a fresh interpretation of Blinky Bill, a much-loved literary character created by New Zealand children's author Dorothy Wall, and a lucrative new animated franchise was swiftly born. A feature film, Blinky Bill: The Mischievous Koala, debuted in 1992 and was followed by a spin-off-TV series in 1993, which proved a smash hit not only on its native Australian soil but also in several European territories. The Adventures of Blinky Bill initially ran for two seasons between 1993 and 1995 but was given a new lease of life in 2004, when Yoram Gross, through a recently-formed partnership with German media company EM.TV (the same media company who also had The Muppets at one point in time), brought the series back for an additional season (somewhere in between, there were also unsuccessful efforts to give Flap, Blinky's platypus sidekick, his own spin-off series, but we're not talking about those today). The culmination of this revival was a Christmas special in 2005, Blinky Bill's White Christmas, which was directed by Guy Gross (son of the studio's eponymous founder) and would prove the last hurrah for the 2D incarnation of Blinky, before Yoram Gross Film Studio put him back into cold storage for a further decade and eventually rebooted him as a CG animation franchise in 2015.

Clocking in at just under 80 minutes, Blinky Bill's White Christmas was technically our second Blinky feature film, albeit made specially for television. How does it compare to The Mischievous Koala? When I reviewed that film earlier this year, I rated it as being fairly chaotic on the narrative front, what with its reliance on extensive and digressive flashback sequences, its insanely dragged out climax and its curiously abrupt ending, although I gave it strong enough marks for atmosphere and emotion. Blinky Bill's White Christmas beats its predecessor hands-down in terms of narrative consistency (White Christmas doesn't have an amazingly fleshed out story, but there's at least coherent progression from Point A to Point B), but in all other areas the 1992 feature has it licked. For one, White Christmas is nothing to write home about visually speaking. The Mischievous Koala utilised Gross's signature aerial imaging technique of superimposing animated characters onto live action backdrops, resulting in an ostensibly primitive look that's surprisingly effective at emphasising the innocence and fragility of its protagonists when stacked up against the big and tumultuous world. This was not exported into the 1993 TV series, which went with a more traditional painted background approach. By the time of the 2004 revival, the animation industry had changed significantly and a digital ink makeover was in order; as a result, the third season has a significantly altered, more vibrant and less detailed look that's difficult for me to comment on without betraying my personal preference for hand-painted cel animation. I need only glance at a frame from Season 3 and I feel over-stimulated by the immense amount of colour saturation going on. Compared to the garish simplicity of Season 3, White Christmas boasts some fairly detailed background imagery that's easier on the eye, but the mood and character of Blinky's earlier adventures is very much missed. On the plus side, original voice actors Robyn Moore and Keith Scott are still on board (with the additional voice talents of Sarah Aubrey and Shane Withington) and do as fine a job as ever.

Blinky Bill's White Christmas functions as the grand finale to The Adventures of Blinky Bill, although long-term fans of Gross's Blinky should note that two major characters from the TV series, Marcia the marsupial mouse and Shifty the dingo, are conspicuously absent here, but for a handful of very brief blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos during the opening montage. This would be less galling if the special didn't also waste so much time with random incidental characters we've never met before and (this being the final bow for this incarnation of Blinky) won't ever see again. The main narrative arc sees Blinky and Flap travel to the fabled Wollemi forest in search of a rare pine tree, but there's also a superfluous subplot involving Miss Magpie's efforts to assemble a school choir from the talentless tykes she teaches, meaning we get lots of useless filler sequences with nobodies like Angela the possum, Johnny the weak-bladdered rabbit and Tim and Tom, bandicoot twins who trade identities on a daily basis. The purpose of this narrative thread, other than to pad White Christmas out to the full 80 minutes, feels as if it's to further impress the special's big musical centrepiece, "Christmas in Australia" by pop singer Christine Anu, onto the viewer. I can't find any evidence that the song received a proper commercial release, but the special's tendency to keep periodically emphasising its existence does have the air of an odious marketing ploy about it.

As Miss Magpie's shrill assembly of pint-sized choir animals are eager to inform us over and over, it's Christmas in Australia, and if you know nothing else about the Australian climate then know this - Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, so over there Christmas occurs in peak summertime. The traditions and iconography of the Australian Christmas are still very heavily rooted in those of its European counterpart, however, so it is not at all uncommon for Aussies to exchange cards depicting wintry scenes and Santa Claus heavily clad in his Coca Cola-endorsed reds, right before they hit the beach for a glorious day of surfing and sunburn. Keeping in mind that Blinky had by now established a strong fanbase in Europe as well as Australia, I don't find it too far-fetched that the plot of the special was purposely designed with an eye toward bridging the gap between the sweltering Australian Christmas and the traditional European white one. Blinky picks up on the curiously discordant nature of the former when he asks Wombo, his elderly wombat mentor, why Santa would wear such a ridiculously bulky suit in the middle of summer. Wombo explains to Blinky that many of the holiday traditions with which they are familiar originate in the Northern Hemisphere, where Christmas is associated with cold and snow. Blinky finds the entire notion of a frosty Christmas to be very far-fetched at first, so Wombo shows him a home movie of a trip he made to Europe as a younger wombat, where he was able to experience one of their legendary white Christmases first-hand. During his visit, Wombo acquired a snowglobe, which he has cherished ever since, for looking upon it always reminds him of his glorious Christmas in the frozen North. The instant Wombo produced the snowglobe and explained very clearly what it meant to him, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was very unlikely to survive the special intact - the snowglobe looks extremely fragile, it's just received a wad of exposition and, let's face it, Blinky is a ticking time-bomb - and sure enough, it isn't long before Wombo's much-loved artifact is reduced to a shattered heap. Remorseful at having broken Wombo's snowglobe, Blinky decides that the only way he can possibly compensate is to recreate Wombo's white Christmas experience right there in Greenpatch. Blinky delegates the task of creating snowfall to Splodge the kangaroo and Nutsy the girl koala while he and Flap venture out into the wilderness in the hopes of bringing back another staple of the European Christmas, a decorated pine tree. Rumor has it that some rare specimens can be located in the distant Wollemi Forest, although said forest is also reputed to be home to a variety of fearsome prehistoric creatures, so most Greenpatch residents are smart enough give it a wide berth.

The antagonists of the special are a couple of professional "plant poachers" named Chopper and Sly, who also have their sights set on plundering the mysterious goodies of the Wollemi Forest. They might as well be Harry and Joe from the original film, and in fact they come across as versions of Harry and Joe that have been purposely watered down in order to appear less intimidating to younger viewers (not that Harry and Joe themselves made for particularly formidable foes during their climactic showdown with Blinky and his gang, but they were at least capable of dishing out destruction of truly cataclysmic proportions toward the start of the film). Chopper and Sly are easily my least favourite aspect of White Christmas, for their sequences are frankly even more of a chore to sit through than the aforementioned filler with Miss Magpie and her choir. If you read my review of The Mischievous Koala, you might recall me noting that Yoram Gross's take on Blinky Bill attracted some controversy for its negative portrayal of the woodchipping industry. The original feature was careful to cover itself with a disclaimer emphasising that its villains were into illegal woodchipping practices only, but I've found at least one source claiming that the Australian forest industry took offense when the lyrics "Save us from that woodchip mill!" were incorporated into the TV series' theme song. White Christmas plays things as safe as humanly possible, by giving Chopper and Sly an extensive amount of dialogue in which they plainly discuss the criminality of their own plant-harvesting actions, just so there's no confusion as to which subcategory of woodchipper Yoram Gross are condemning. Needless to say, Chopper and Sly's villainy is painted in very broad strokes, and they make for fairly unengaging antagonists, too on the nose in their misdeeds to have any kind of authenticity but also too dense and ineffectual to seem capable of causing any real harm. It doesn't help that they're a variation on the same stupid-little-skinny-guy-and-slighty-less-stupid-but-still-pretty-stupid-fat-guy schtick we've seen replicated hundreds of times in the wake of Laurel and Hardy.

Despite the 80 minute run time, there's not a whole lot actually happens in White Christmas. Blinky and Flap have various run-ins with Chopper and Sly and are eventually cornered in a cave, where they befriend a large wombat-like creature they name "Wol" (on the basis that that's the only thing he can seemingly say). Wol's species is never formally given, but he's a Diprotodon, a type of extinct giant burrowing marsupial related to the wombat (I know this, not because I'm amazing proficient in marsupial paleontology, but because Lobe once referenced the species in an episode of Freakazoid!). Wol, of course, is one of the prehistoric residents of the Wollemi Forest, but Blinky and Flap don't twig this right away. The most curious thing about Wol is that he wears a diaper, presumably as an easy shorthand to clue us in that he's only a baby, although later on when we actually get to the Wollemi Forest and meet the rest of its oddball menagerie they turn out to be largely non-anthropomorphic and are quite content to strut around in the nude, so...who among them forces Wol to wear a diaper for his modesty/convenience? Then again, we don't really get to spend a lot of time in the Wollemi itself. The obvious dilemma Blinky faces, as he finally reaches the forest, is whether or not it's ethical for him to cut down and make off with an endangered tree, even for something as ostensibly unselfish as a friend's Christmas celebrations. This is where the bulk of the special's drama lies, for we never sense that Chopper and Sly pose much of a threat to the forest (and indeed, Wol's father is quite capable of seeing unwanted encroachers off himself, without the aid of Blinky or Flap). It's here that White Christmas would really have benefited from a sprinkling of the trademark melancholia that ran rife throughout the Dot features and The Mischievous Koala, in order to convey a sense of the Wollemi Forest being something very special and vulnerable. As it is, the Wollemi is really just a bland forest populated by slightly odd-looking creatures who don't talk or wear clothes (Wol's mysterious diaper notwithstanding). Evidently, it's meant to be a place that time forgot, but not enough is done to instill it with its own unique atmosphere or mystique. In the end, Blinky decides that he cannot cut down one of the wollemi pines and risk destroying the homes of any of the forest's residents, but regrets not having anything to show for his troubles to Wombo...whereupon Wol gets him out of his spot by gifting him with a small potted wollemi seedling. A sweet gesture, although it does raise further questions, such as where did Wol even manage to get hold of that pot in the first place? Like his diaper, it somewhat undermines the implicit idea that that these creatures are meant to be untouched by civilisation, be it that of humans or anthropmorphic bush critters.

Overall, most of what I've had to say about White Christmas has probably sounded overwhelmingly negative, so I should emphasise that I don't dislike the special, I just don't think that it benefited in any shape or form from being dragged out to feature length. There's probably just enough plot here to fill out a standard 22 minute episode of the regular TV series. Trim off the subplot fat involving the choir animals and Splodge and Nutsy (whom we keep checking in on intermittently), along with any conversation between Sly and Chopper that goes on for more than five seconds, and you'd be left with a much slicker (although still unremarkable) product. At 80 minutes, White Christmas is a pleasant but soporific experience, one that will likely struggle to retain the interests of older viewers.

The juiciest aspect of Blinky Bill's White Christmas occurs in the last few seconds of the special, when it decides, quite out of the blue, to throw a genuine curiosity at us. Blinky and Flap return to Greenpatch with an additional souvenir in the form of Sly and Chopper's woodchipper (possibly a deliberate callback to Blinky and his gang hijacking Harry and Joe's vehicle at the end of the original film), to discover that Splodge and Nutsy's efforts to create genuine snowfall have all ended in failure. That's when Blinky hits upon the idea of creating a kind of faux snowfall by feeding the woodchipper old newspapers and sprinkling the cut up shreds of paper over Greenpatch like confetti (I was somewhat surprised that a special with such an explicitly eco-friendly story would go with a solution that's basically tantamount to littering, but so long as the residents of Greenpatch are prepared to chip in to clean it up afterward...). The outcome seems to satisfy Wombo, and the special ends with all of the animals gathered together beneath Blinky's paper storm, singing one last rendition of that infernal "Christmas in Australia" song. That's when we pan away to reveal that the entire scene is actually just something Blinky is observing inside a snowglobe, just before he turns to wish the viewer a merry Christmas. And that's how the 2D version of Yoram Gross's Blinky permanently signs off. I...have no idea what to make of that ending, but I instantly get flashbacks to another TV show that infamously opted to end with the inexplicable implication that the entire series was nothing more than an idle daydream going on inside the head of a child with a snowglobe fixation. Are we supposed to draw similar conclusions about Blinky Bill's entire canon? I don't know, but I'm happy to step back and let the fan theories commence.

The Rescuers Down Under: Of Mice, Men and Those Left Behind To Rot

Last month, I wrote an entry on the "Disneyification" of nature, partly in response to the discussions raised in David Ingram's book Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, where I identified Bambi, The Lion King and Brother Bear as Disney's three animal-orientated ecopics. Those are the three which most obviously attempt to match environmental consciousness with a sense of grandeur and/or mysticism, although in truth there are probably a few others I could have mentioned. I purposely left out Pocahontas (1995), which has a definite ecological theme but regulates the animals therein purely to the roles of comic sidekicks. The Fox and The Hound (1981) is another nature-orientated story, but it doesn't have a particularly explicit eco-theme, outside of the film's obvious distaste for Amos's hunting practices, which are the single biggest obstacle to Tod and Copper's friendship. There is arguably also a message about the need for wild animals to remain wild, as Tod's adoptive human owner is ultimately forced to release him into a nature reserve after keeping him as a house pet for a year, although the delivery of this message is not exactly ideal (in reality the chances of Tod successfully adapting to the wild, under the circumstances, would be slim to nil). On a similar note, The Jungle Book (1967) centres around Man and Nature accepting their respective, entirely separate places; Mowgli has been raised by wolves and identifies with the savagery of the jungle over the cleanliness of the human village but is ultimately persuaded that the latter is where he belongs. Crucially, Mowgli is lured to civilisation by the charms of a young female, which links his final acceptance of manhood to the onset of adolescence, the jungle he leaves behind being both a literal wilderness and a metaphorical childhood. The exact same happens in reverse for Tod of The Fox and The Hound - under the ownership of Widow Tweed he was permitted to live the life of a perpetual cub, but once he is forced from this cosy domesticity he finds renewed purpose in the prospect of settling down and raising a litter with a young female fox, Vixey. Mowgli must accept that he is a man much as Tod must accept that he is a wild animal, but in both cases the outcome is the same, with Disney upholding ideas about traditional family values in man and beast alike.

Although The Fox and The Hound wants us to believe that Tod and Copper's childhood friendship ultimately survives the test of time, the film closes on a conservative note, reinforcing the warnings of both characters' respective mentors, Big Mama the owl and Chief the veteran hunting dog, that society is upheld by certain boundaries that cannot be crossed. It is tempting to interpret the early declarations of friendship between Tod and Copper as emblematic of a youthful innocence which has yet to be tainted by social prejudices, but it would be shrewd to remember that this friendship is also facilitated by one of the two participants - Tod - being uprooted from his rightful place in the order of things. In fact, a lot of the conflict arises from Tod's poor understanding of how the world works due to his not having lived the life of a normal fox. Copper understands ahead of Tod that certain responsibilities are expected of him, for he has always been where he is intended to be, whereas Tod spends much of the film struggling to come to terms with his own calling and, once he has been restored to his true place in the wilds, he too must accept that there is no longer space in his life for something as frivolous as romping around with a hound. The film's final sequence appears to offer a compromise, for Tod and Copper are both shown reminiscing about their youthful interactions in a manner that suggests the survival of their friendship in a symbolic sense, as a mutual nostalgia for a simpler time. In both cases, that wistful longing for a lost innocence remains but is overridden by allegiances to their respective family units; Copper to his master Amos and his surrogate father figure Chief and Tod to Vixey and their prospective offspring. The prevailing message of the Disney feature is that the preordained social order is to be accepted and respected, and reverence for the natural world is often used a thinly-veiled means of asserting such values. If something as radical as a fox and a hound being friends is to have its place in that, it must be safely contained within the realm of wishful thinking.

There is one other animal-orientated Disney feature with an explicit ecological agenda, and my failure to tip my hat to it in my aforementioned piece no doubt constitutes a serious oversight on my part (not least because it was one of the defining films of my own childhood). Released in 1990, The Rescuers Down Under at the time represented something of a curiosity for the Disney feature animation canon, it being Disney's first attempt at a theatrical sequel to one of their animated classics. Audiences had first encountered globe-trotting albino mouse Miss Bianca (Eva Gabor), Hungarian representative of the Rescue Aid Society, along with her her neurotic American cohort Bernard (Bob Newhart), in the 1977 film The Rescuers. Adapted from a series of novels by Margery Sharp (although fine-combed to remove Sharp's political overtones), the film follows our tiny heroes as they head to a deserted swamp to answer the distress call of young orphan Penny (Michelle Stacy), who has been abducted by disreputable pawnbrokers Medusa (Geraldine Page) and Snoops (Joe Flynn) and is being exploited in their nefarious efforts to get their hands on a valuable diamond. The Rescuers Down Under rejoins Bernard and Bianca (still Newhart and Gabor) thirteen years later* and sees them journey to the Australian outback to rescue Cody (Adam Ryen), a young boy kidnapped by ruthless poacher McLeach (George C. Scott), who has been picking off the local wildlife population with the help of his pet goanna, Joanna (Frank Welker), and suspects that Cody can be cajoled into leading him to the nest of a family of rare golden eagles. Sandwiched in between Disney's surprise mega-hit The Little Mermaid and the Best Picture-nominated Beauty and The Beast, The Rescuers Down Under technically falls into Disney's "Renaissance era" but but even the most ardent Disney fans have a tendency to overlook its place in the studio's history. If retrospectives care to mention Down Under at all, they typically focus on the film's technical significance (it was the first traditionally animated feature to fully utilise CAPS, or Computer Animated Production System, the revolutionary computerised process that gave all subsequent Renaissance era features their sophisticated sheen). The film received positive notices from the critics for its dazzling animation and exciting set-pieces but was widely ignored by the general public. It was released to US theatres at around the same time that that festive comedy where Kevin cripples two desperate men was the hot new thing; audiences clearly had an appetite for schadenfreude, and a picture about two earnest mice looking to help out a lost child no doubt seemed quite soppy and tame by comparison. Over time, the film has garnered admirers for its slick visuals and breakneck action (not to mention, the glut of direct-to-video Disney "cheapquels" that came throughout the late 90s/early 00s has merely amplified the level of ambition evidenced here**) but it remains a fairly neglected chapter in the annals of Disney history.

The Rescuers Down Under feels like a curious anomaly when compared to the rest of Disney's output during the Renaissance era (for one thing, it is not a musical, which may have been its single biggest mistake from a marketing standpoint, given how ravenously the public had devoured the pop Broadway stylings of The Little Mermaid) and as such it might be better viewed as the tail end of Disney's experimental streak during the so-called "Dark Ages" of the 1980s. At a time when the future of the company's feature animation (and feature animation in general) seemed uncertain, Disney made several attempts to reinvent themselves to suit the tastes of modern viewership, often with limited success. The Disney features of the 1980s were seldom great films (The Little Mermaid being an obvious exception) but it's nevertheless interesting to see what kind of stops Disney were pulling in an effort to keep themselves afloat. Whereas The Little Mermaid saw Disney return to a more "traditional" form (their first fairy tale adaptation since 1959's Sleeping Beauty), The Rescuers Down Under finds the studio in a more modern and adrenaline-seeking mood, its emphasis being largely on spectacle and on cutting-edge action sequences. Apparently, Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was initially quite skeptical about the box office potential of The Little Mermaid, which he thought had a limited market as a "girls' film" (although he later changed his mind following positive test screenings); with that in mind, The Rescuers Down Under comes across as Disney's attempt to court a more masculine audience (something they had tried and failed spectacularly to do with The Black Cauldron in 1985) by reinventing themselves in the vein of contemporary action-adventure films like the Indiana Jones series. This could well have been the future had the film had better luck at the box office. Instead, the public embraced the so-called "girls' film" and its spiritual successor, Beauty and The Beast, and the formula for the Disney Renaissance was swiftly molded. The Rescuers Down Under was a commercial misstep that was immediately forgotten, but as with all of Disney's commercial missteps and failed experiments,there's endless fascination to be had in the unpicking process, and in the "What if?" factor that haunts just about every bold new project that did not work out as planned.

In my review of Yoram Gross's 1992 film Blinky Bill: The Mischievous Koala, I identified The Rescuers Down Under as Disney's attempt to ride along on two significant bandwagons of the dawning 1990s - firstly, the demand for environmentally sensitive children's cartoons (which peaked in popularity - some would say notoriety - with DiC Entertainment's Captain Planet) and secondly, Hollywood's short-lived love affair with Australian culture, which was kick-started by the strong box office returns of the Crocodile Dundee films. I noted, however, that The Rescuers Down Under presents a conspicuously Americanized view of Australia, "with the Australian wilderness serving merely as a backdrop to stories populated by characters with predominantly American accents." For the most part, Australian accents are reserved for the more incidental characters, while Cody and McLeach, the only humans who get any significant amount of screen-time, speak with distinctly American tongues. Ingram doesn't throw The Rescuers Down Under so much as a sideways mention in Green Screen (confirming its status as one of Disney's more neglected features), although another writer, Amy M. Davis, identifies the film's ecological themes in her book Handsome Heroes and Vile Villains: Masculinity in Disney Films, and links Cody's egregious lack of an accent of an Australian accent to the film's attempts to utilise the antipodean setting to convey a message rooted in quintessentially American ecological concerns. David writes that "his attempts to protect the golden eagle he has befriended, and in particular his attempts to protect her eggs, could be said to link him to American conservation efforts for golden eagles and bald eagles in the United States" (p.36) Although identified, ambiguously, as only a "great golden eagle", Marahute was presumably inspired by the wedge-tailed eagle, a large eagle species native to Australia, although she would have to be a freakishly big one. (Naively, Davis also identifies a precedent for the film's environmental thinking in Disney's infamous True-Life Adventure series and asserts that, "Cody, no doubt, would be a fan of the series." Not when he finds out what they did to a bunch of innocent lemmings, he wouldn't.) If Ingram were to reference The Rescuers Down Under, he would no doubt criticise it, as he does with Kroyer Films' Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992), for its depiction of the Australian wilderness as "a National Park, unaccountably empty of its darker-skinned, aboriginal inhabitants." (p.43) As always, whenever Disney attempts to capture something of the romance and intrigue of a foreign location, we end up with the cinematic equivalent of going halfway around the world only to stay in our resort and dine exclusively at McDonalds restaurants; this is Disney's brand of ecotourism.

I should confess that the original Rescuers film from 1977 holds a special significance for me, for it was the very first film I ever saw on the big screen, during its re-release in 1989 (yes, yes, I know - during my very first cinema trip I saw a topless woman flash her tits at me and didn't even realise it; I'll never know how much the experience contributed to the shaping of my somewhat warped personality). When the film came out on home video a year or so later, I snapped it up and watched it incessantly (I even operated my own home cinema in which I charged my plush animals to attend the back-to-back screenings). It was from an artfully-placed trailer on the VHS release that I learned there was going to be a second movie featuring Bernard and Bianca, and that completely blew my mind. I was among the minority (it transpires) who were positively over the moon at the prospect of a sequel to The Rescuers, and I was counting down the days until it hit the theatres. I convinced my mother to take me to see it during the opening weekend and soaked up every minute of it. I loved the music, Joanna the goanna and the entire sequence in which the mice relay Cody's distress call all the way across the Pacific. And yet, there was one aspect of The Rescuers Down Under that greatly disturbed me. As the end-credits started rolling, I recall that my reaction was not one of awe or euphoria at the spectacle I had just witnessed, but one of deep-seated shock. Namely, I could not believe that the film was choosing to wrap up at the specific point in the narrative that it was. You see, there is a sequence around midway through the film where McLeach, unable to persuade Cody to spill the beans on Marahute's whereabouts, leaves him imprisoned overnight in a room filled with various caged Australian fauna, and Cody devises an ill-fated attempt to escape along with these animals. The sequence concludes with McLeach catching Cody as he tries to unlock the animals' cages and advising him to "Say goodbye to your little friends...you're never going to see them again." Turns out that he might as well have been speaking directly to the viewer, because we don't see any of these characters again. The film just flat-out forgets about them. The final sequence has Cody and Marahute mutually liberated, McLeach vanquished and the Rescuers proven heroes yet again; Cody tells Marahute, "Let's all go home", and off they fly into the night. There's a brief tacked-on epilogue involving Wilbur, the Rescuers' albatross escort (John Candy), and the credits start rolling. There is never any mention of heading back to McLeach's hideout to rescue the animals still rotting in their cages, a loose end the film seems oddly contented to leave dangling. As with the original, I grabbed The Rescuers Down Under when it came out on home video and watched it repeatedly, but with each and every viewing this particular story thread never ceased in sitting uneasily with me. "They would go back", I tried in vain to reassure myself, "Cody would go back and free them. They just had to go back." Maybe the production team assumed that audiences would draw such a conclusion through their own initiative and feel entirely at ease with how the film ends. Maybe. But still, we never see it happen, nor is there even the vaguest form of reassurance that it will happen. And that troubled me immensely.

I think the first thing to note is that The Rescuers Down Under is not an especially disciplined film on the narrative front. It tries to pack a lot into its seventy-seven minute run time, but much of that consists of subplots and random digressions from the main storyline that amount to little more than filler designed to buff the story out to feature length - only then, the film winds up with so much on its plate that it isn't able to tie up all of its story threads satisfactorily and ends abruptly. Opinion is heavily divided among fans as to which Rescuers film is the superior of the two, but a common criticism from those who prefer the 1977 original is that The Rescuers Down Under meanders so frequently from Bernard and Bianca's narrative arc that it barely qualifies as a Rescuers film at all; rather, it's an action-adventure film about a boy and his eagle that just so happens to have the Rescuers in it. Whereas the original starts out as a sort of private detective mystery story, which has the viewer every bit as much in the dark as the mice and becomes a rescue adventure only once the reasons for Penny's disappearance have been established, The Rescuers Down Under begins with Cody and doesn't bring in Bernard and Bianca until more than fifteen minutes in; it works "backwards", since the film has already established exactly who Cody is and why he's been kidnapped, and it's now a matter of bringing Bernard and Bianca slowly up to speed with what the viewer already knows. I can comprehend such criticisms - the viewer does end up feeling less involved in Bernard and Bianca's arc than in Cody's - but I'll state upfront that my own sympathies are with Team Down Under. I think that both films are enjoyable but distinctly flawed, each with their own individual strengths and weaknesses (their common strength being that Bernard and Bianca are likeable characters and that Newhart and Gabor do a wonderful job voicing them), but ultimately I'm inclined to give the edge to the sequel. It's a much better-looking film, the narrative pacing may be messy as sin but it's never slow or boring, and it dispenses with the murky yet incongruously cloying flavour that dominates so much of the original; that distinctive Don Bluth brew that would become the then-Disney animator's trademark once he'd moved onto producing his own feature films. Actually, I do like just how bleak and desolate the atmosphere is down at Devil's Bayou - it accentuates the middle of nowhere-ness of the location and it really does feel like the most terrifying place on Earth for a small child to be whisked away to - but there's a lot about the original Rescuers that feels either excessively saccharin (ie: Penny and that whole dialogue she has going on with her teddy bear, which I guess I'm supposed to find charming) or just plain goofy (whose idea was it to turn the bloodhounds from Sharp's novel into crocodiles, of all things? Scarier animal for Medusa to have domesticated and lounging around her houseboat, but also more surreal and therefore more ridiculous). I like the 1977 film, but it is a peculiar hodgepodge of ideas, not all of which mesh. But then I could say the same about the 1990 film. It's a string of set-pieces and arbitrary subplots that just about hang together as a whole while the experience lasts, but once it's over it leaves you feeling oddly unsatisfied.

With hindsight, it seems obvious to me that at least part of the reason for the extended digression with Cody and the caged animals was to shoehorn in an additional comic relief character in the form of Frank, a frill-neck lizard voiced by Wayne Robson (who had previously played Harry in the Disney trauma-rama One Magic Christmas). I recall that Frank was featured quite prominently in the film's promotional material, despite having such a limited, barely relevant role in the story itself. To put it uncharitably, he feels like an afterthought who got tossed in late in the story development process just to add another face to the tie-in Happy Meal range. It would explain the slipshod implementation of Frank's entire character arc, and the abrupt manner in which it's just left hanging, but in a way that makes it all the more disturbing. Frank was engineered to be one of the film's "breakout" characters. We're supposed to like him, root for him and want to go out and eat lunch at McDonalds just to get our hands on the bendy Frank toy. And yet, the film is ultimately quite happy to leave him rotting behind bars, with no suggestion of rescue. Did nobody seriously raise a storm about this during the film's test screenings?

I got to thinking, was this really such a disturbing anomaly for Disney? Were there any prior examples in which the weak and helpless were left in a dire situation with no clear indication that rescue was on the way? I thought it over and realised that, yes, there are at least two precedents for this in Disney's animated canon, the first occurring in Walt Disney's second animated feature, Pinocchio (1940). Ostensibly, it ends quite well - Pinocchio becomes a real boy, Geppetto is retrieved from Monstro's gut and Jiminy Cricket receives his official certification as Pinocchio's conscience, but what about Lampwick, Alexander and those other boys who got turned into donkeys and shipped off to the salt mines? Are we just going to forget about them? I guess so. Pinocchio is a black-and-white morality tale and it doesn't go easy on the unruly boys who bunked off to Pleasure Island just because they're children. The assumption here is that since they gave into their baser impulses and indulged in all manner of vices they forfeited their right to humanity and should remain asses (besides, have you read the original story by Carlo Collodi? The Disney version toned things down, believe me). Their downfall is directly linked to their failure to adhere to family authority - during his horrific transformation, Lampwick's last waning flickers of humanity are expended crying out in desperation for his mother and father, whose moral guardianship he realises, too late, he was wrong to stray from.

Similarly, the plight of the impounded dogs in Lady and The Tramp (1955) is all but forgotten by the end of the film; Tramp is spared their fate and inducted into Jim Dear and Darling's household, and clearly we are supposed to feel satisfied with that, even though the life or death stakes for the unlicensed dogs are made very clear when an unfortunate extra named Nutsy is seen "taking the long walk". A thin thread of hope is offered in the form of Dachsie, a dachshund who is last seen attempting to tunnel his way to freedom, but it seems unlikely that he could liberate the pound's entire population. On a human level, Lady and The Tramp has an obvious lesson to teach about law and order. Equipping one's dog with a license is shown to be a facet of responsible pet ownership, and this ensures Lady's safe return home after being picked up by the dogcatcher. On the dogs' level it translates into a class symbol, with two of the impounded dogs being swift to bestow the derisive nickname of "Miss Park Avenue" upon Lady and jokingly suggest that she was discarded by her household for "putting fleas on the butler". Boris the borzoi explains to Lady that this apparent animosity is rooted in envy, for every other dog in the pound would unquestionably give up their hind leg for such a luxury. The impounded dogs have a nice enough camaraderie and their lack of a license is not attributable to any fault of their own, but it's clear that a dog of Lady's pedigree would sooner not be anywhere near them - the dog warden explicitly remarks to Lady that she is "too nice a girl for this place", and when she is later returned home, she complains only of how "embarrassed and frightened" she was during her experience at the pound, with no thought or compassion extended to the dogs still imprisoned there. By the end of the film, the class barriers have ostensibly been broken, for Lady has accepted Tramp as her mate and the two of them now stand proudly over their mixed breed litter - in order to facilitate this, however, Tramp has first had to acquire a license of his own and prove himself worthy as a house dog. He does so by defending Jim Dear and Darling's baby from an external threat in the form of a rat, thus aligning himself with the traditional family unit. The film concludes with the all-American family safe and protected, their values further reaffirmed in being paralleled by their faithful canine companions - cats, meanwhile, are depicted as the preferred pet of the childless spinster and are aligned with a number of unpleasant foreign stereotypes to boot.

The preservation of traditional family values, and of middle-class America, is at the heart of Lady and The Tramp, with Jim Dear and Darling's baby being a minor character who stays largely off of screen but who is nevertheless pivotal to so much of the plot direction and to Lady's understanding of her own purpose and priorities. Like The Fox and The Hound, there are lessons in recognising and accepting one's true place in the established order - Jim Dear and Darling initially treat Lady as a baby substitute, but once the real baby arrives Lady must come to terms with the fact that her days of being at the centre of the household are over and accept her new role as the family's guardian. This role is fulfilled in warding off the various intruders that manage to infiltrate Jim Dear and Darling's pristine household, either because the humans aren't aware that they're there (as with the rat) or do not recognise the threat that they pose (as with the Siamese cats). Lady initially rejects Tramp's offer that she permanently abscond with him on the grounds that she is needed to watch over her human family; Tramp, meanwhile, sees humans as little more than meal tickets and considers it foolish for a dog to tie itself down to a single household (here, we see shades of his equally promiscuous lifestyle with the ladies) but ultimately learns the error of his ways. The film is content to leave the impounded dogs where they are because, while genial, they represent too much of a subversion to the guiding principle that a dog's purpose is to support the family unit; if they are unable to acquire licenses of their own then they are best off out of sight, where they cannot muddy the immaculate lawns of Jim Dear, Darling and their ilk. (Note that this is even more troubling in the DTV sequel, Lady and The Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure (2001), in which Tramp breaks into the pound to free my namesake and flat-out ignores the other dogs. Whereas in the original film Tramp put himself on the line in order to liberate two strays from the dogcatcher's wagon, by the sequel Tramp has become so safely domesticated that he no longer feels any affinity toward the unwanted dogs or their plight.)

The preservation of the traditional family is also at the heart of The Rescuers and its sequel. Whereas Lady and The Tramp was concerned with the protection of a family unit under siege from foreign influences, the original Rescuers deals with the restoration of a family that has already been torn apart and corrupted. Penny was an orphan who wanted desperately to belong to a family but faced constant rejection from prospective adoptive parents, chiefly because she struggled to make herself stand out in the crowd. "A man and a lady came and looked at me, but they choosed a little red-haired girl. She was prettier than me," she confides in Rufus the cat (John McIntire), painting a thoroughly unflattering picture in the process of contemporary adoption procedures, which appear to have dehumanised Penny to the level of one of those unwanted dogs in the pound, or worse, a hat in a shop window. It's the lack of positive adult influence that's implied to leave Penny vulnerable to the manipulations of the "trashy people" (according to Rufus) who run the local pawn shop. Medusa and Snoops are here our external threats to the wholesome American family, with the various words chosen by Rufus to describe them ("weird", "trashy", "sleazy") appearing to link this threat to class or at the very least to those who deviate from societal norms. Indeed, if you squint hard enough, it's possible to read Penny's living situation in Devil's Bayou as a twisted subversion of traditional domesticity; Penny finds herself in the care of two adoptive "parents", as it were, with Medusa as the screeching matriarch and Snoops her hen-pecked partner, while reptilians Brutus and Nero have taken the place of more conventional housepets (ie: Tyrant and Torment, the hounds of the original novel). At one point, Medusa attempts to convince Penny that life aboard the houseboat is the closest thing she could hope to find to a regular family, confirming her worst fears when she asks her, "What makes you think anyone would want a homely little girl like you?" Salvation arrives in the form of Bernard and Bianca, who retrieve Penny from Medusa's unconventional household and return her to the Morningside Orphanage, where she is commended for her bravery and swiftly adopted by the nice, clean-cut parents she always wanted.

The Rescuers Down Under similarly deals with the fractured family unit, only here the running theme is one of absent fathers and single mothers. Cody and Marahute's affinity is strengthened through the realisation that their respective families have each been rocked by the loss of a patriarch. When Marahute takes Cody to her nest and shows him her eggs, he is quick to ask "Where's the daddy eagle?" (This sounds at first like a characteristic Disney attempt to project traditional family values onto the natural world, but male wedge-tailed eagles do indeed assist with the raising of chicks, so it's a legitimate question). Marahute's forlorn expression tells us all we need to know on the matter. Cody identifies personally with her family's plight, telling Marahute that "My father's gone too," a revelation that allows for a touching moment of connection between the boy and the eagle but otherwise doesn't have a great deal of overt plot relevance. Cody's father isn't mentioned again and there's no suggestion that any of his actions throughout are motivated by a yearning for his departed father - indeed, Cody's father could easily have been added in at the beginning of the film and no other plot amendments would have been warranted. Rather, the purpose of this particular background detail looks to be more about emphasising the tragedy for Cody's mother when she is later led to believe that her son has met his own premature end (see below). Outside of a single, understated shot of her cradling her son's savaged backpack, however, Cody's mother is practically a non-entity; she waits passively at home while Cody is off having his death-defying adventure, less a character than an emblem of the domestic safety to which Cody aspires to return. Her avian counterpart, meanwhile, symbolises the threatened wilderness that Cody is also driven to defend, a feminised Nature that's motherly, nurturing and benevolent, and to which our villain, McLeach, serves as a direct counterpoint, being the traditional figure of the rugged, masculine trapper amplified to its most wildly grotesque proportions.

Deprived of their breadwinning mates, the film's two single mothers are left vulnerable and/or ineffectual, and wide open to the mutual threat that surfaces in McLeach, a dire menace not merely in his penchant for eliminating local fauna but also the knowingly nefarious assaults he launches upon family ties for boy and bird alike. Although motivated primarily by material gain, McLeach appears to derive a perverse kind of pleasure at the thought of tearing apart Cody and Marahute's respective clans. When he realises that Cody could lead him to the mother eagle's whereabouts, he admits, with spine-chilling glee, that, "I already got the father!" While kidnapping Cody, he makes a point of hurling his backpack into crocodile-infested waters in the hopes the authorities will assume that Cody was the victim of a crocodile attack, during which he cries out, "My poor little boy got eaten by the crocodiles!" in preemptive mockery of Cody's distraught mother. Later in the film, having captured Marahute, McLeach sets Joanna loose upon the eagle's nest to devour the eggs, less out of generosity to his lizard cohort than the desire to see the eagle stay rare (and thus valuable). His assault on our sense of everything good and decent is two-fold, a crime against both an entire species and an individual family unit. Even by Disney villain standards, McLeach is a horrifying creep who clearly enjoys being the bad guy a heck of a lot more than he should. Trouble is that he's so damned entertaining. One of the main reasons why I consider the sequel to be an improvement on the original is because it boasts the stronger villain; at any rate, I prefer McLeach's brand of comic book sociopathy to the high camp ferocity of Medusa, who is basically a trampier version of Cruella de Vil (in fact, she WAS Cruella in earlier versions of the script). As a bonus, McLeach and Joanna also provide us with a rare instance of a male Disney villain with a female sidekick.

McLeach's masculinity, which manifests as a desire to exploit and dominate nature, is shown to be malign, and yet these exact same urges are paralleled, more heroically, in the Rescuers' own arc, which sees Bernard on a personal quest to discover himself in the Australian wilderness. The film casts Bernard in what Ingram defines as the prevailing paradigm of nature-orientated fiction, even those with clear environmental sympathies, wherein a trip to the wilds presents an opportunity for a male protagonist to "recover an essential, authentic masculinity and thereby to reassert the hegemony of the white male not only over non-human nature, but also over his ethnic, racial and gender subordinates." (p.36) Having reached Australia, Bernard and Bianca join forces with local murine Jake (Tristan Rogers) who offers to lead them across the outback when Wilbur injures his back and puts himself out of commission. (Side-note: Jake is one of the film's very few characters to sport an authentically Australian accent, although he still tends to attract a lot of ridicule from commentators who like to make a point about him being a kangaroo rat, an animal native to North America that, deceptive moniker aside, has nothing to do with Australia. That's because Jake is not a kangaroo rat, genius, but an Australian hopping mouse). Jake has his own ulterior motives for wanting to tag along with the rescue mission, for he has a weakness for the females and is eager to impress Bianca. This is bad news for Bernard, who after thirteen years is finally looking to pop the question to his long-term partner (I'm surprised that the triskaidekaphobic Bernard would wait until this year to make his move, but then his fear of the number thirteen never comes up in the sequel, despite seeming practically gift-wrapped for an in-joke), and now has to deal with unwelcome competition. Stuttering, superstitious Bernard has always been one of Disney's least conventionally masculine heroes (which is precisely what makes him so endearing), with Jake embodying all of the traditionally manly traits that Bernard emphatically does not. Jake is tough, confident and thrives on adrenaline; Bernard is shy, socially awkward and prefers not to look for trouble, so obviously he's the underdog in this scenario.

A moot point in this entire dynamic are the actual underlying feelings of Bianca, who never indicates that she's interested in Jake as anything other than a tour guide and appears to drift through the adventure wholly oblivious to the battle of masculine wills going on right under her whiskers. Her main purpose in The Rescuers Down Under is to be a sweet and fetching feminine figure for the males to posture to, and the prize that Bernard must prevent from being snatched away by this spring-footed Johnny-come-lately, although whether this constitutes a downgrade from her role in the original film is up for debate. The original Rescuers had something of a mixed attitude toward Bianca. Evidently, she was intended to be a progressive female protagonist for the modern age, and she does have a number of duly positive traits - she's strong-willed, fully capable of using her own initiative and is recognised by her male peers as a pioneer in her resolve to personally spearhead Penny's rescue - but the film does try to have its cake and eat it with her, and I honestly struggle to think of a Disney feature that's more condescending and conspicuously 1970s in its attitude toward women than The Rescuers. Bianca may be a spunky modern heroine, but she's also the butt of a number of old hat jokes about the vain and frivolous things that women supposedly do (for example, she risks missing the all-important flight to Devil's Bayou and stalling the rescue because "a lady has to pack a few things"). Her request to be assigned Penny's case is honoured, but not without the Rescue Aid Society Chairmouse (Bernard Fox) giving her an odious pat on the hand and insisting that she take a male accomplice. (Medusa, meanwhile, continues a running gag of Cruella's about women being reckless drivers.) Jettisoned from the sequel are the original's high number of sitcom-level "women, eh?" quips, although Bianca does not have much of an arc of her own. The script places no demands on her for growth, development or change; the personal journey is all Bernard's, and it's about his needing to man (mouse?) up.

Ultimately, the film vindicates Jake's bravado, for Bernard realises that the only way he can rise to the challenge is by emulating his rival's example. Mirroring how Jake had previously subdued a dangerous snake and goaded it into serving as a mode of transport for the mice, Bernard is able to wrestle a razorback (feral pig) into submission (after his attempts at politely imploring the pig for help go nowhere) and convince it to carry him across the outback. In both cases, manliness is equated with a mastery over nature, with the "civilised", anthropomorphic mice putting the fear of god into the bestial, non-talking predators and effectively domesticating them as beasts of burden. In order to show the pig who's boss, Bernard is required to disregard not only his trademark anxiety, but also his social graces, metaphorical pearls which are shown to be wasted before the literal swine. Manners do not make the man, but mastery does.

Amid Bernard's voyage of masculine discovery, the more traditionally feminine roles of childcare and domestic upkeep are identified as crucial but less glamorous and ultimately degrading for a male to have to stoop to. Bernard does briefly find himself caring for Marahute's eggs (which he saves from being devoured by Joanna by replacing with decoys), but swiftly delegates the task of having to sit on and watch over the precious clutch to Wilbur while he sets out to conquer the outback. Wilbur accepts the responsibility but recognises that he's being a made a fool of and grumbles incessantly (to the point that the film's final punchline shows him still complaining about his allocated role in the climactic adventure). This is not the only point in the film in which a male character is undermined through association with femininity; earlier, during the sequence with the caged animals at McLeach's base, Frank the lizard is taunted by sardonic koala Krebbs (Douglas Searle), who tells him that his skin will eventually be sold as the raw material for a lady's purse, which is clearly branded as a more degrading fate than the belts and wallets Krebbs identifies as being in the other animals' futures. At this point, it seems appropriate to explore how the caged animals fit in with the traditional masculinity championed by The Rescuers Down Under, and from this why the film appears so unconcerned about their final fate. Noteworthy is that all of the caged animals who have voices are male; by contrast, the two most prominent wild animals encountered by Cody on his outback travels are both female - in addition to Marahute, Cody is friends with a jill kangaroo named Faloo (Carla Meyer), although her role is limited strictly to the film's opening sequence, where she summons Cody for help. The wilderness threatened by McLeach is personified as predominantly female; he has already done a meticulous job of weeding out and neutralising the males, who can now only sit around helplessly as the enemy lays waste to their wives and offspring.

Among the fauna imprisoned by McLeach is a male kangaroo named Red (Peter Firth), whom as a child I recall taking as an automatic given was the stolen mate of Faloo. With hindsight, I have to berate myself for ever making such a silly assumption; Australia is chockablock with kangaroos so there is little reason to assume that these two should have anything to do with one another. And yet, I wonder if we are indeed intended to notice the male and female kangaroo in their respective predicaments and forge some kind of mental connection between the two (even if it does not go as far as presuming them to be related), not least in how it echoes our theme of absent fathers and helpless mothers, and McLeach's previous statement about already having wiped out Marahute's mate. McLeach operates first by targeting the males and leaving the females exposed (he does not have any plans for Cody's mother, but even his abduction of Cody and staging of his death, leaving her only to cradle his backpack in distraught solitude, is a variation on this). These animals are in McLeach's private zoo because they were unable to step up and fend off this nefarious intruder. The bars and chains that hold them captive are symbols of their failure and emasculation; worse still, they are watched over and subjugated by a female, Joanna. Likewise, once Jake finds himself caged in McLeach's wagon, along with Cody, Marahute and Bianca, he good as drops his bravado - "It don't look good, Miss B, I can't see any way out this," he can be heard uttering shortly before Bernard shows up to demonstrate his mettle. Whereas the original Rescuers appeared to be making a point about the kind of pesky eccentrics who might end up influencing our children if traditional family values are not upheld, The Rescuers Down Under concerns itself with the kinds of unsavoury alpha males who may supplant the traditional patriarch if he allows his dominance to weaken. Down Under supposes that females are incapable of safeguarding against the advances of such interlopers on their own and are in need of male saviours and defenders; Cody's mother is completely ineffectual, Marahute repeatedly falls victim to McLeach's traps, while Faloo is reliant on Cody to carry out rescue missions. Charm and stealth are shown to be integral components of the predatory male's attack; McLeach is not exactly a wolf in sheep's clothing - we know from the minute we meet him that he is to be our antagonist - but he does not come off as entirely unreasonable at first. He looks as if he might be willing to let Cody go, but changes his tune when he realises what information Cody may be harbouring. By the end of the film, McLeach has revealed himself to be the kind of cold-blooded ghoul who would not only murder a child to get what he wants, but revel in every second of it.

The film concludes with a compromise of sorts. It is Bernard who defeats McLeach, thus eliminating the predatory male and upholding the sovereignty of the heroic male, but it is ultimately Marahute who saves Cody (and Bernard) from completing a deadly plunge down a waterfall. Having taken a stand for Mother Earth, she repays their kindness by ensuring their survival, enabling an intersection of the film's environmental sympathies and its distinctly conservative family values. Its feminisied nature is dependent upon masculine heroics to keep her protected, and she in turn sustains her male defenders, positing the arrangement as mutually beneficial. Meanwhile, a more explicit reaffirmation of traditional gender roles and family dynamics plays out in the conclusion to Bernard's arc. In the closing scene, he seizes the opportunity to finally propose to Bianca, who joyously accepts while Jake, acknowledging Bernard as the better man (or mouse), steps graciously out of the conflict. Bernard has gotten in touch with his masculinity and can now claim Bianca as his reward, the promise of marriage solidifying their relationship while compensating for the number of broken couplings referenced throughout the narrative. Cody, through his own acts of devotion and heroism, similarly suggests a bright future for both the environmentalist principles and the honorable masculinity promoted by the heroes of Down Under. Unlike the original Rescuers, in which Penny's broken family was explicitly restored in the form of her new adoptive parents, Down Under does not care to supply Cody with a replacement father figure; such a gesture would be redundant, for Cody has already demonstrated that he is capable of standing on his own two feet and is firmly on his way to becoming his father's successor, at least in terms of filling the gap in masculine authority. Down Under bemoans a weakened and waning masculinity (and a femininity endangered as a knock-on effect) but ends with that masculinity discovering a new lease of life. The film does not look back upon the failures of the past and instead concludes with our heroes soaring off toward a golden new future - which, unfortunately, means leaving Frank and and the others behind to rot in their steel cages. As far as Down Under is concerned, they are the failures of the past, and it ultimately affords them no more sympathy than the impounded dogs in Lady and The Tramp or the mutated boys in Pinocchio. Like I say, it's not a particularly satisfying conclusion, but it is where the film ultimately leads us.

Actually, there is one other thing that always bothered me immensely about The Rescuers Down Under. Early on in the film, Jake is accompanied by a sidekick of his own, a fly named Sparky who is apparently a whizz at checkers. Shortly after the Rescuers arrive in Australia, Wilbur puts his back out and starts flailing around wildly with the Rescuers' luggage, only to inadvertently strike Sparky. After that, Sparky is never seen again. Did Wilbur kill him then?

 Gimme hope, Joanna.

* Any mouse alive in 1977 would have been long dead by 1990, of course, but we mustn't be sticklers for realism in a movie where they also wear hats and fly around the world via albatross. 

** On the other hand, those direct-to-video sequels may also have cheapened Down Under's credibility, as there's a tendency now to lump them into the same category. I've seen a lot of people question why this film is considered part of the Disney feature animation canon when all of those other sequels are not - the answer being that Down Under was produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, the company's theatrical animation department, whereas all of those DTV sequels were created by Disneytoon Studios, the studio mainly responsible for the company's television animation projects.