Mouse Hunt (aka Hitler with a Tail, The Omen with Whiskers, Nostradamus didn't see this!)

We've already talked at length about how enduring a horror motif is the image of the rat in the walls, a tiny encroacher whose very presence is enough to bring all sense of domestic stability crashing to the ground. But what of the rat's smaller cousin, the mouse? Technically, the very same principles should apply - the Mus musculus within the home is as much a symbol of chaos and contamination as the Rattus norvegicus, the only obvious difference being that rats have a clear size advantage. And yet popular culture has been altogether more favourable to the mouse, who is instead likely to be heroised as the little guy succeeding in a big world. As we've observed from numerous Tom & Jerry shorts, the encroachment of the mouse is traditionally treated not as the breakdown between wilderness and civilisation, but as the gleeful subversion of an assumed order, the mouse a valiant Robin Hood figure who survives by pilfering from the spoils of the rich and powerful. You won't find many villainous mice in film or literature, one of the rare exceptions being the Mouse King from E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" - and even then, some adaptations do prefer to make him a rat, I suppose because "Mouse King" sounds considerably less intimidating than does "Rat King". With all that in mind, is there such a thing out there as mouse horror - that is, media that pushes in the precisely the opposite direction, and makes the miniature interloper into a big and threatening presence? As unlikely as it sounds, Mouse Hunt, an unassuming slapstick comedy from 1997, and the debut feature of Gore Verbinski (who went on to direct the first three installments in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise), may well be the closest we've ever come to getting a legitimate mouse horror. As pratfall-heavy family films go, Mouse Hunt is a strange beast - it promises endless goofball antics and it certainly delivers, but takes such a coldly skin-crawling approach that for a lot of the time it plays less like a riotous farce than a disorientating, PG-rated nightmare.

The family films of the 1990s don't have much of a reputation for being dark and downbeat, certainly not compared to the family films of the 1980s, although thinking about it, I'm not sure that's an entirely fair assessment. Rather, I'd argue that they were dark and downbeat in different, more beguiling ways. Gone were the dangerous fantasy worlds of The Dark Crystal (1982), The NeverEnding Story (1984) and Labyrinth (1986), or the rating systems chasms that enabled more family-leaning horror fare like Poltergeist (1982) and Gremlins (1984) to go surprisingly far on a PG rating. The 1990s saw family films return overwhelmingly to the domestic setting, where they played deceptively like sitcoms, and seemed altogether more colourful and upbeat in tone - darkness persisted, but was to be located largely within the cracks spanning the banalities of contemporary living. Home Alone (1990) got the decade off to a brutal and ugly start, although I'm not convinced that Home Alone itself is really smart enough to grasp just how brutal and ugly it is. Also of the early-90s Macaulay Culkin boom was the nostalgic My Girl (1991), an ostensibly lightweight film that dealt with heavy subject matter, in that it's about a mortician's daughter coming to terms with the omnipresence of sex and death in the world, and how the two necessitate one another. Elsewhere, The Addams Family (1991) and The Addams Family Values (1993) were love letters to the strange and the macabre, Casper (1995) went to some fairly morbid territory, and Matilda (1996) is easily the most endearing and vibrant film you'll ever see on the subject of child abuse (and unlike Home Alone is actually self-aware enough to follow its ruminations all the way though to their logical conclusion). Even Babe (1995) had an evident appetite for the grotesque (consider that scene where Babe takes a wrong turning into an abattoir), which was ramped all the way up to eleven in its sequel in 1998 (for better or for worse). And then we have Mouse Hunt, which might well be the greatest oddity of them all. The theatrical trailer, which seems deliberately reminiscent of the trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), clues you in that you're in for an experience slightly off of the beaten track. The horror elements are played primarily for humour, but there is something faintly unsettling about that dexterous mouse and his eerie refrigerator shadow play.

(Note: Before I get into the film itself, there is some discrepancy regarding how the title should be spelled. Is it Mouse Hunt, MouseHunt or Mousehunt? I've seen all three variations used across different sources. For the purposes of this review, I'm going with "Mouse Hunt", simply because that's what's on the billing block of my VHS copy of the film.)

Mouse Hunt opens on a somewhat similar story beat to Casper, with a recently deceased parent whose thorny relationship with their disaffected offspring is manifested in the derelict old building they see fit to unload on them in their will. As with Casper, the ostensibly worthless building might actually be the doorway to a tremendous fortune, but the recipients' prospects of accessing it are hampered by the unusual vermin they discover lurking on the premises. The heritors here are a couple of brothers, Ernie (Nathan Lane) and Lars (Lee Evans), the sons of a once successful string manufacturer, Rudolf Smuntz (William Hickey, in his final film role), whose business has fallen into decline. Lars, the younger and more conscientious of the two sons, has been dutifully running the string factory since Rudolf's ailing health forced him to step down, while Ernie, who's spent much of adulthood estranged from his father, has enjoyed a more illustrious career as a celebrated chef in a top restaurant. All Rudolf has to leave them in his will, besides the dwindling string factory and a handful of low-grade personal possessions, is a decrepit old mansion that neither son assumes they'll have any use for, but fate has fiendishly cruel twists in store for them both. Ernie's career and reputation is obliterated overnight following an incident involving a lobster, a cockroach and the city's beloved mayor (none of whom survive the experience). Meanwhile, Lars refuses an enticing buyout offer for the factory from a rival company, thus honoring a promise he made to his father on his deathbed, but incurring the wrath of his wife April (Vicki Lewis), who tires of his lack of financial drive and boots him out of the house. Cast out and shunned by the wider world, the brothers now have no one to turn to but one another, and nowhere to go but that run-down old property they inherited from Rudolf. Just when things appear to have hit rock bottom, Lars and Ernie uncover blueprints revealing that the mansion is in fact a lost work by esteemed architect Charles Lyle LaRue and, if properly renovated, multiple admirers of LaRue would be interested in bidding for the property, among them a particularly fervid collector named Alexander Falko (Maury Chaykin). Things finally seem to be looking up for the Smutnz brothers. There is, however, a fly in the ointment, for the mansion is also home to a tiny but resourceful squatter who could potentially throw a wrench into their plans - a mouse who's quite set on staying where he is, renovations be damned, and whose gnawing presence slowly but surely drives Lars and Ernie up the wall. The war is once again on between man and rodent for domestic dominance - and, of the two, guess whose best-laid schemes are about to go seriously awry?

Plotwise, Mouse Hunt bears some resemblance to Of Unknown Origin (1983), in which a man is gradually driven off the rails by his obsessive vendetta with the rat living within his walls, although tonally it plays more like a Laurel & Hardy picture for the post-Home Alone generation, in that the narrative is largely an excuse to unleash a barrage of punishments of an especially cruel variety upon our leads for most of its runtime. For sure, Mouse Hunt has a thin premise, and is somewhat hampered by the inevitably episodic nature of the plotting; there is a long stretch around the middle portion of the film that consists of little more than Lars and Ernie and attempting various methods of mouse eradication - an onslaught of traps, a maniacal cat, and then a creepy, coprophagic exterminator portrayed by Christopher Walken (working his characteristic Walken magic) - all of which play out as disastrously as you might imagine (and worse). And yet, I think that Mouse Hunt succeeds overall as an unashamedly sour, off-kilter family comedy, in part because Lane and Evans have a likeable comic chemistry that ensures that we remain engaged even when the plot is in danger of sagging, and also because the film's persistently unsettling tone gives the proceedings quite a bit more character than you might imagine. Despite appearances, Mouse Hunt is not a cute film about a tiny creature battling the odds, but a strangely disorientating experience about a small problem coming to seem ever more oppressively monstrous. It's a peculiar film, and that goes in its favour.

At times it's surprising how far Mouse Hunt is willing to go with its gruesome slapstick humour, and occasionally the consequences get undeniably nasty in ways that they never did in Laurel & Hardy or Tom & Jerry, or even in Home Alone (where no one was ever seriously hurt, despite the extreme amount of physical punishment endured). Take the sequence involving that unfortunate cockroach and the equally ill-fated mayor played by Cliff Emmich, which is the part that really got to me as a kid. I'm aware that I affix the "childhood trauma" label to everything that I found even vaguely unsettling back then, to the extent that it's probably lost all meaning by now, but trust me when I say that that sequence haunted me for days afterward. Even now there is a lingering question that continues to bother me about this particular plot point - namely, am I supposed to have any feelings at all toward the poor sap who died? One would presume not, since he's more a plot device than an actual character and the sequence in which he devours the bug and then suffers a heart attack upon realising his mistake is played purely for laughs (and, with hindsight, as soon as you hear the words, "Will your recent triple heart bypass affect your campaign strategy?" you should know this guy's a goner). All the same, his wife and kids were present and witnessing the full traumatic incident, and that doesn't sit so well with me. Actually, the kids don't seem terribly bothered; while their father is being loaded into an ambulance they're running around and playing with the police barricade tape - when we learn that the heart attack proved fatal, however, the family are never brought up again, and I can't help but feel slightly aggrieved on their behalf. Elsewhere in the film, we get a particularly brutal throwback to Tom & Jerry, when the Smuntzs enlist the services of Catzilla, a cat with an excessive amount of killer instinct, which results in the cat taking a tumble down a dumb waiter shaft and presumably leaving a cat pizza down in the basement - unlike the cartoon cat he's homaging, Catzilla doesn't get back up again. In a perverse way I think it's admirable how prepared the film is to attach genuinely grim consequences to its cartoon violence, so that it intermittently plays like an anecdote to the kind of frivolous sadism on show in Home Alone - here, the participants can get hurt, even killed, and it makes the mayhem seem all the more uneasily doubled-edged. Having said that, there are numerous other places in which the film fully embraces those cartoon sensibilities to an insane degree - notably, a sequence where Lane's character endures a freak accident significantly worse than anything Catzilla went through, and comes out unscathed (it involves being rocketed through a chimney by a gas explosion and ending up at the bottom of a frozen lake - by god, no person could survive that). The slapstick may be uneven, but it builds toward a satisfying climax in which we get to see the various participants at the LaRue auction go at one another tooth and nail as the man-to-rodent warfare finally reaches breaking point. It is very obvious where that's all headed, but if you're not laughing at that point then you lack a pulse.

Mouse Hunt was a modest success in 1997, grossing 122 million worldwide against a budget of 38 million. It's the kind of film that I imagine would absolutely sink like a stone in today's box office, but back in the 1990s audiences still had a taste for the kind of all-out schadenfreude orgies popularised by Home Alone, and live action animal pictures were likewise big business then (nowadays that particular market appears to have completely dwindled, that one about the dog's purpose notwithstanding). Critics were less enthusiastic, although among the minority who did like the film, strangely enough, were our friends at Halliwell's Film Guide, who awarded it two stars out of four (Halliwell's rating system is slightly confusing, but for them that's basically good), observing that the film succeeded as a modern reworking of Laurel & Hardy and Tom & Jerry, although even they seemed taken back by the "dark, Gothic tone" of the film. Less charitable was Roger Ebert, who also gave it two stars out of four (Ebert's rating system is less confusing, and in his case that's not so good), criticising the film's over-reliance on visual effects at the expense of more substantive comedy, and its overall lack of character refinement. Ebert raises a valid point in his review, in that the film does not make it clear which of the warring factions we're expected to side with. On the one hand, the mouse is superficially adorable, and there is an obvious David and Goliath attraction in seeing it outwit an assortment of foes much larger than itself. On the other hand, we see the story predominantly through Lars and Ernie's perspective, and we're acutely aware of what the stakes are for them. This is something that I've always found vexing about Mouse Hunt - as an audience, we don't really know who we're rooting for, or if indeed we're rooting for either side in particular, which makes it difficult to gauge where exactly we want this whole scenario to end up. But then there's a lot about the movie that seems deliberately dislocating, from its gloomily grotesque aura to its ambiguous temporal setting (for much of the time, the film looks beguilingly like it takes place in the 1940s, but...it doesn't. Rather, it seems to be set in a parallel universe where the 40s never went out of style).

There is one sequence that seems curiously out of the step with the rest of the film - a sequence that occurs early on in the plot, in which the viewer is called unambiguously to sympathise with the mouse. We see the mouse innocently sleeping among a collection of hoarded knick knacks, whereupon Lars disturbs it with a nail gun and comes close to skewering the momentarily helpless rodent, albeit unwittingly. Curious, because this is the only moment (for a long stretch, anyway) in which the mouse comes off as genuinely vulnerable and without the upper hand. Elsewhere, while we presumably are expected to delight in seeing the mouse defy the Smuntzs' every attempt to destroy it, the mouse is presented as a surprisingly sinister figure, a creeping presence who spies on the two brothers and has an uncannily astute handle on their every weakness. All the while, the mouse is still wretchedly adorable, but it's adorableness comes increasingly to seem like a front to mask the full terror lurking within. It's on this level that I think Mouse Hunt plays like the strangest kind of horror film, in which the sheer magnitude of what the Smuntzs are dealing with is only very slowly revealed. Imagine if we'd seen Home Alone from the reverse perspective, with the Wet Bandits as our protagonists, and if, like them, we assumed that Kevin that was just a dumb and helpless child and only gradually realised what a sociopathic little monster they were up against? With hindsight, the moment in which the mouse is made to look innocent and helpless feels like a trap, its purpose being less to align our sympathy with the mouse than to pull the rug out from under us when the mouse proceeds to demonstrate its vindictive nature and causes Lars and Ernie to drop and write off the expensive hot tub they were hauling up the stairs.

Ebert didn't particularly take to the mouse in his review, pointing out that the mouse commands little sympathy because we know effectively nothing about it as a character: "Is the mouse intelligent? Does it know and care what is happening? Or is it simply a movie prop to be employed on cue? We aren't told, and we don't know." While I agree with Ebert that the mouse is not exactly a sympathetic figure (because its very presence is so unnerving), I would disagree about it being an "ingenious prop", and I believe that a number of the questions Ebert asks are answered, or at least the answers are strongly inferred. In that yes, the mouse is intelligent and yes, it does understand and care what's going on. At the very least, it's aware that the Smuntzs are conspiring against it, and it's entirely capable of machinating back. For their first attempt to destroy the mouse, the Smuntzs leave out a trap baited with an olive, which the following morning they discover has been activated, with neither the mouse or olive in sight. On closer inspection, Lars discovers the stripped olive pit lying next to the trap and deduces that the mouse purposely left it there to rub in their failure and let them know that it was one step ahead. Ernie dismisses Lars's reading as pure anthropomorphism: "He's not sitting in his hole in a smoking jacket, sipping cognac, giggling, I left the pit!" Everything Ernie says is logically sound, and yet so naked is his hubris that we know, intuitively, that he's wrong, and that he's setting himself up for a royal humbling - which arrives almost immediately when he discovers the mouse lounging nonchalantly in his cereal box. The mouse's unnatural intelligence gets even more unsettling during the Catzilla ordeal, in which it knowingly lures the unsuspecting moggy to its death, and by the outcome of Walken's sequence, we realise that we've wandered into serious Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy territory, with the mouse's scheming and abilities going disturbingly off the charts. We're informed at the start of the film that the previous tenant of the building was found locked in a trunk in the attic (it's never confirmed if they were found dead or alive, either), and it's subsequently revealed that the same thing happened to Walken's character following his own heated confrontation with the rodent. The implication being that the mouse somehow locked them in? It's at this point that the mouse goes from being a freakishly cunning specimen to something altogether unearthly - less a rodent than a demonic entity in a deceptively unassuming form. (It gets even more eerie when you contemplate that it was actually the mouse that enabled the Smuntzs to come across the all-valuable blueprints in the first place, suggesting that it may even be toying with them for sport.)

I'll say this much in the mouse's defence, though - it doesn't actually become a problem until the brothers insist on making it one. It is technically the Smuntzs who trigger the inane, if deadly warfare, in leaving out traps baited with olives, once Ernie decides that the mouse is a blemish on their plans to renovate and auction off the property. Lars questions if a single mouse is really worth the effort, but following his mishap with the cockroach Ernie isn't inclined to be charitable toward vermin, believing that the mouse could become an issue later on if they don't nip it in the bud. But of course, the reverse plays out, with this seemingly minuscule problem becoming ever more gargantuan the more and more punches the Smuntzs throw into the ring. The mouse may be a dangerous force to trifle with, but there is a sense that the brothers' increasing obsession is what's causing the matter to magnify, and that they could back out at any time they wanted if they weren't so fixated on not letting this diminutive beast get the better of them. Mouse Hunt is fundamentally a film driven by an underlying gag and an underlying moral, the gag being that Lars and Ernie start out dealing with a tiny house pest but end up battling a force of nature much, much greater than them. There's a sequence where Lars, in attempting to operate the string factory while the workers are on strike, gets his clothing caught in the machinery, which seems to signify the idea of everything unraveling from a single pulled thread.

The moral of the film is difficult to miss (albeit phrased in slightly oblique terms) since it gets its own title card right at the beginning, and is echoed at two points throughout the course of the film itself - that is, a quote attributed to the deceased Rudolf Smuntz: "A world without string is chaos." Lars later repeats this phrase, as if it were a family mantra, and at the very end of the film we see that the brothers have immortalised their father's words on a plaque at the factory. That the phrase is displayed so prominently before the film has even begun clues us in as to how integral it is to the overall meaning. The implicit image is of severed connections, and a fundamental lack of unity binding things together, which ultimately results in calamity, and it calls attention to the festering tension that is constantly underpinning the characters' interactions - the brothers' unspoken resentment toward one another and their mutual malaise regarding their late father, a conflict established in the very first scene, where the discord between the two brothers at their father's funeral causes their pall-bearing to go awry and Rudolf's corpse to be lost down the sewage system (a macabre set-piece that also paves way for the film's darkly irreverent tones). Lars and Ernie manage to avoid any particularly heated confrontation until the third act, when the various failed attempts at pest control take their toll and the brothers finally explode and have it out with one another. Ernie expresses his grievances over Lars supposedly being the favourite son and his frustration over his repeated failure to win his father's approval, while Lars voices his dissatisfaction over being tied to the family business and his thwarted career ambitions, hinting that he greatly envies Ernie for being able to break away and forge his own path. One senses that their relentless pursuit of the mouse has been nothing more than the misdirection of this unexpressed anger, something they can wave a broom at while not addressing what it is that's been clawing away at their inner egos all this time.

If Mouse Hunt, for all of its grisly trappings, is really a fable about the healing of broken-down family relations, we might question how the mouse fits in with all of that. I think there two potential schools of thought. One is that the mouse is the literal reincarnation of Rudolf, the troublesome father the boys assume has left them for good, but has actually returned to trouble them in another guise. This would fit in with the mouse ultimately being the one who convinces the Smuntzs to embrace their family heritage, but we also need to consolidate it with the fact that Rudolf's spirit seems to manifest elsewhere in the film, in the form of a portrait that hangs in his office at the string factory, and apparently observes and reacts to everything going on around it. Either way, there is a sense of Rudolf continuing to haunt the brothers from beyond the grave, as a lingering presence that, like the mouse, is not entirely benevolent - the cockroach that harpoons Ernie's career, after all, emerges from the box of cigars that Ernie picked out of Rudolf's personal belongings, and it strikes like a final mocking manifestation of Rudolf's disdain, a feeling underscored by Ernie's preceding remark of "Just like the old man to die before I hit it big." Of course, the suggestion that Rudolf would purposely murder the mayor just to spite his older son is maybe going a bit far, but the image is nevertheless evocative of the idea that Rudolf's memory remains a thorn in Ernie's side and is impeding his ability to move forward, despite his attempts to casually shrug the loss off. Which leads us into the second interpretation - the mouse is a demon, although not in the conventional sense. Rather, the mouse is a personal demon; the Smuntzs' anxieties, self-loathing and general bitterness at the hands life has dealt them all wrapped up into an impossibly tiny package. After stumbling across the blueprints, Lars and Ernie assume that they can leave their miserable old lives behind and move onto a better one, but find that their various unresolved conflicts cannot be so readily discarded and continue to follow them as they head toward the big leagues. It is a tiny imperfection that the brothers assume that they can easily blot out, but it continues to nibble away at them, and before they know it their obsession has devoured them and their entire world is in disarray.

The broken threads between the brothers and parent are symbolised in the piece of string Rudolf presents to his two sons on his deathbed, a good luck charm he claims to have picked up on his first day in America. It is Rudolf's parting plea for Lars and Ernie to come together and take shared responsibility for their future, a message that's lost on the brothers, particularly Ernie, who nonchalantly asks if they should cut the string in half. Later, when the Smuntzs assume that they've vanquished the mouse once and for all (having accidentally stunned the mouse, they find themselves seized unexpectedly by mercy, and instead attempt to mail it to Cuba), Lars represents the string to Ernie, who accepts it, a sign that the brothers may finally be putting their troubles behind them and developing a genuine unity. Unfortunately, attempting to toss the underlying problem away does no good - when the package is returned from Cuba due to insufficient postage, the mouse resurfaces and its first action is to seek out and devour the piece of string, undermining the Smuntzs' newfound stability, and seemingly eliminating both their past and their future in one fell swoop. And yet, following the house's inevitable destruction, the string is miraculously recovered from the wreckage, as if from the ashes of their defeat the brothers find that they have the renewed strength in them to rise again. They do not even appear to regret their loss too much - perhaps it is even a relief for them to see the object that had them consumed with so much avarice and paranoia destroyed. As they hold the string, they accidentally pull it into two threads of equal length, echoing Ernie's prior suggestion, although the implicit symbolism is no longer of severed connections, but of the brothers finally understanding the importance of sharing whatever burdens lie ahead.

Lars and Ernie leave the ruined house once and for all and head to the only other avenue that's open to them - the string factory from which they have long yearned to get away, and where the spirit of their father, whose shadow they have not been able to come to terms with, still lingers in one form or another. The Smuntzs' dread and anxiety is not subsiding; to prove it, the mouse, who also miraculously - if not unexpectedly - survived the wreckage, attaches itself to the undercarriage of their vehicle and rides along with them in the style of Max Cady from Cape Fear. Nonetheless, when they finally return to the source of their malaise and confront it head on they discover that what they have been avoiding this entire time was never really as bad as they supposed. Inside the factory, the mouse takes on a more benevolent presence and shows the Smuntzs a new way forward, leading the film into a surprisingly upbeat conclusion in which all three characters are able to prosper by combining their individual talents to one end. Using Lars's managerial skills, Ernie's culinary skills and the mouse's discerning taste buds, they give up the string business and re-purpose the factory for the manufacturing of a popular line of string cheese, with the mouse serving as taste tester. Ernie also expresses a desire to make the mouse the company spokesperson, taking inspiration from some other people "who've used a mouse as a spokesperson."  The message, then, is that the only way to move past one's personal demons is not to resist or cast off those demons but to make peace with them. In doing so, Lars and Ernie facilitate peace not only for themselves, but also for Rudolf, whose portrait is finally seen smiling at the end. The closing image of the film shows the plaque bearing Rudolf's motto, and above it the string he gave to Lars and Ernie, the two separate threads now firmly entwined. It is a curiously optimistic ending for a film that, up until now, has taken such a mean-spirited stance, one that ascribes a sort of duality to the mouse as a character, in that the level of threat it poses ultimately seems to come down to Lars and Ernie's perspective. Having made it through their seemingly endless night of animosity and self-loathing, the world seems like a brighter, more hopeful place in the light of day. The mouse is really two sides of the same coin - it spends most of the film embodying the chaos of the universe, but in the end it's also the string.

A happy and prosperous Year of The Rat to you all.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #21: Roller Pandas (Kit Kat)

This ad, which appeared as part of the long-running "Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat" campaign in 1989, is one that I can remember people raving about long before I had the chance to see it for myself. For a while, I was aware that there was this ad making the rounds in which a photographer was patiently waiting beside a zoo enclosure to take a picture of two pandas who are keeping well out of sight, only for them to appear in a dramatic fashion when he turns his back for some inopportune chocolate indulgence. People talked a lot about this ad, and how hilarious it was, and yet for a while it never seemed to show up in any ad break I was watching. Like the protagonist of the ad in question, I waited for a seeming eternity, although in my case my patience eventually did pay off. I finally saw the much-hyped panda ad, and to my four-year-old psyche it seemed more nightmarish than funny - which had less to do with the jerky costumed figures portraying the pandas than it did the implication that these bamboo-biting bums were deliberately toying with the photographer. The suggestion that these bears were conspiring (literally) behind the back of this unsuspecting chocolate-lover struck me as deeply sinister (and yes, they are doing it on purpose - in the Ukrainian version below, which is the best quality upload I could find on YouTube, you can make out the knowing glint in their hard plastic eyes.) Added to which, we have the closing implication that this man could potentially be stranded in the same position for all eternity. The moment he's been holding out for has already been and gone; he was robbed of the breathtaking sight of two giant pandas - a notoriously solitary species - pulling off a perfectly choreographed dance on roller-blades, and all because he got side-tracked by the temptations of a chocolate-coated wafer.

It is curious, in terms of the narrative of the ad, that it's the protagonist's weakness for the product being hawked that prevents him from achieving his objective. The slogan instructs us to, "Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat", yet it's clear if we pick the wrong moment in which to withdraw from the action, we risk missing out on something big. Having a Kit Kat is shown to be as perilous, in a more subtle way, as eating a Quaker Harvest bar and risking attack from ravenous squirrels. But maybe the implicit narrative is a bit more complex - keep in mind that those pandas wouldn't have emerged at all if he hadn't decided tot take time out to consume a Kit Kat. So it was always futile. In momentarily detaching himself from his fruitless pursuit, the photographer gets to enjoy a few brief moments of sensual pleasure before recommitting himself to the inertia - in other words, the Kit Kat represents a reprieve, a short moment of fulfillment before he is lured back to his eternal stasis. Clearly, this man isn't going to be walking away from that enclosure any time soon, with or without a panda snap in hand, and the Kit Kat at least gave him a taste of something. The ad thus celebrates the break itself as the meaningful part of life; the obvious futility of the protagonist's endeavor, meanwhile, is underscored comically through the absurd sight of those rollerskating pandas, inferring that whatever you feel obligated to be doing in between is, by comparison, misspent energy.

I might have been troubled by the pandas' mockery as a small child, but as an adult I must admit that my sympathy leans more toward their side. I mean, try looking at this whole scenario from their perspective; if for, whatever reason, they have an aversion to having their image captured by this photographer, then that's their business entirely. As such, they're trapped in their den, also watching and waiting for their unwelcome spectator either to go away or at least turn around for long enough that they get a fleeting burst of freedom. So when that opportunity arises, of course they're going to grab it and live it to the full. The pandas thus owe their break to the Kit Kat, even if it is their nemesis who actually devours it - their frenzied roller dance constitutes their own pause from the inertia, before they inevitably must retreat back to their hideaway and the stalemate resumes, with neither party showing any prospect of yielding. Perhaps there is another implicit narrative to be gleaned from this set-up - the Powers That Be are constantly surveilling, waiting to trap our souls in their dreaded boxes. All we can do, like the pandas, is watch back. Be vigilant, and the time will come, while they're distracted with their carnal urges, for us to get out there and dance at their expense.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #20: Hot Duckling on Hippo Action (Silentnight)

Since the late 1980s, UK mattress company Silentnight have been synonymous with the image of a pajama-clad hippopotamus snuggling a tiny yellow duckling, a mismatched mascot combination so beguiling that the official Silentnight website sees fit to dedicate an entire page to answering the burning question as to the thinking behind the imagery, albeit not in any extensive depth:

"Hippo and duck demonstrate the Silentnight beds are suitable for all shapes and sizes."

The combination was less perplexing to those who'd been watching during the early days of the campaign, when the metaphorical significance of having a hulking hippo bedding down with a diminutive duck was more explicitly illuminated. The concept, devised by ad agency BDH/TBWA, was basically a disarming means of alluding to one of the persistent hazards of not sleeping alone - the possibility that your bedfellow might roll over and smother you in your sleep, or at least cause you some serious sleep deprivation. Watching the original Duck and Hippo ads, you are painfully conscious of just how tiny, delicate and, above all, squishable that duckling (played by a real flesh and blood duckling) looks compared to that heavyset hippo (represented by a puppet) - one wayward budge from the hippo and that duck is going to become a very unpleasant stain upon that mattress - but thanks to Silentnight's "revolutionary spring system", the two of them can sleep soundly without the risk of traumatic roll over. The ads have a warm, gentle tone that keeps the implied threat to the duckling from ever seeming too imposing. Nothing conveys a peaceful night's sleep quite like the incongruous sight of a duckling lying calmly beside a hippo, particularly a hippo clad, absurdly, in blue and white striped pajamas, and with the dexterity to operate a bedside lamp. It's a cosy, placating campaign, which is exactly the kind of vibe you want to be giving off when you're hawking bedding materials. So much so that I doubt that anyone was ever ribald enough to question why these two creatures of contrast would be slumbering on the same mattress. A duck and a hippo were sleeping together, and it all seemed so chaste and innocent.

Flash forward to the early 00s, when Duck and Hippo had assumed new animated guises (courtesy of London-based animation studio Bermuda Shorts), in a campaign that suddenly seemed very intent on pushing the narrative that our mismatched bedfellows were indeed a married couple, in a way that went slightly beyond the subtle allegory of the 1980s ads. Now the advertising critters had the gift of the gab (Hippo was voiced by Clive Rowe and Duck by Jane Horrocks), and we see Hippo serenading Duck with a rendition of "You Sexy Thing", a 1975 hit for British soul group Hot Chocolate (which had recently gained renewed interest through its usage in the 1997 film The Full Monty, although by the 00s the world was probably quite ready to move on), worked in principally to make a pun about the mattress "mira-coils" that facilitated their unlikely union. This campaign went further with their whole odd couple vibe, so that Hippo is now loud and exuberant while Duck is discreet and refined. Of course, the more overtly you push the narrative that they are a couple, the harder it becomes to prevent the mind from wandering into seriously impure territory - that is, the notion that Duck and Hippo's nights were possibly not so silent - and really, that's just taking things to a whole other level of freaky. I'm not sure there's a mattress in the world that would make that kind of interaction possible, no matter how loaded it is with mira-coil springs. Suddenly, you become conscious of how tiny and fragile that duck is in quite a different way to the original 1980s campaign. The implicit suggestion of interspecies intercourse between a duck and a hippo is mind-boggling enough, but there's the added complication that Duck is technically only a duckling. As in, a juvenile duck. And while she does speak with the mature vocals of Horrocks, those yellow downy feathers are a dead giveaway. But then, as we learned from the Spuds MacKenzie campaign, we are suckers for an inappropriate subtext, and perhaps we only have our own depraved imaginations to blame if we insist on reading any deeper beneath the surface. Ultimately, all we have is the scenario of a duck and a hippo feeling secure enough in each other's company as to share the same sleeping grounds, a token of interspecies harmony that's intended to convey the blissful possibilities of a restful night's sleep.

Except that in the succeeding ad, from 2003, Hippo and Duck were accompanied by a litter of offspring, in a campaign plugging Silentnight's new line of children's beds. As with A Muppet Christmas Carol, where Kermit and Piggy were able to transmute their ostensibly incompatible genes into a family, we have situation in which the male take on the species of their father and the females their mother. By this point, it was hard to ignore the insinuation that Hippo and Duck were sexual partners, as we had evidence that they were reproducing - added to which, we now had to cope with the mind-boggling biological ramifications as to how this tiny duckling, so fragile that she would be pulverised by her significant other if they weren't sleeping on Silentnight's revolutionary sleep system, somehow managed to carry to term two large mammalians in her juvenile avian body. Back in 2003, I made the point to a friend, who gave me a funny look and suggested that perhaps there was an alternative interpretation to be had of this hippo-duck family, and that their God-mocking litter actually consisted of various children from previous marriages (presumably to members of their own species). Alright, fair point. I suppose we still don't have evidence that the campaign's salacious subtext is actually a reality. All the same, I'll wager that Silentnight knew exactly what they were doing in taunting us with the intimation. And besides, she's still a duckling.

Some Enchanted Evening (aka Harsh Reality Time)

I don't think there's ever been a Simpsons episode with more infamously tortured origins than "Some Enchanted Evening" (7G01). Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, writing in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, call it "confident", "fully rounded" and "the perfect template." In the episode's DVD commentary we hear series creator Matt Groening describe it, less flatteringly, as "the show that almost killed The Simpsons." We also hear that, once upon a time, producer James L. Brooks referred to it, less flatteringly still, as "a foul substance which causes disease", albeit in reference to an earlier version of the episode in which the animation was reportedly so unsightly that the producers deemed it unfit to be brandished before the eyeballs of an innocent public, and so they sent it back to Korea for an overhaul. In a more efficient universe where everything ran according to plan, this would have served as the series opener in the fall of 1989 - instead, its miserable unveiling caused a production shake-up which led to it being knocked to the back of the queue and "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", technically the eighth episode, getting to launch the series in December 1989. "Some Enchanted Evening", meanwhile, became the series finale, debuting on May 13th 1990. When I covered "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" last month, I noted how this was probably all for the best, given that "Roasting" is a warmer, more human story, and a much better starting point for longer-form Simpsons, whereas "Enchanted" showcases the Simpsons universe at its most hypnotically kinky. It's not for sensitive eyes, which always makes it a fascinating episode to look back on.

"Enchanted" is somewhat notorious among Simpsons fans because the producers' revulsion toward that early animation was apparently potent enough that they considered canning the series altogether, and only when the second episode, "Bart The Genius", came back in better shape were they convinced that the situation was salvageable. On the DVD commentary, the production staff tell an amusing anecdote, which gives us insight into just how heated the reaction to the initial version of this episode was. The episode was screened before a gathering of staff at the Gracie Films bungalow, and Brooks, horrified at the results, declared, "This is shit!", at which point most of the staff in attendance, sensing that harsh words were about to be exchanged, made a mad rush for the door. Animator Gabor Csupo (they don't identify him by name in the commentary, but it's nevertheless blatantly obvious that they're talking about him) challenged Brooks on this point, suggesting that, "Maybe this shit isn't funny!", in reference to the screenplay. Brooks clearly took that to heart, because later, when the series won its first Emmy award (albeit for "Life on The Fast Lane", not this episode), he took the opportunity to taunt Csupo at the ceremony by repeating Csupo's own line, "Maybe this shit isn't funny!", which Brooks admits on the commentary was probably quite petty of him.

So unbridled was Brooks' reaction that you might assume that he had that early offending footage squirreled away in the same impenetrable vault where he keeps the excised musical numbers from I'll Do Anything*, so that nobody will ever see what ungodly, eye-bleeding horrors were once intended to constitute The Simpsons. And yet, he hasn't. Or rather, he part hasn't. The entire episode has never been released, but you can watch a few minutes' worth of footage from that disastrous version on the Season 1 DVD release and judge for yourself. You can also watch it with an optional commentary, so that you can hear the producers' howls of "OH MY GOD!" every five seconds. In my opinion what we're shown isn't exactly eye-searingly awful (as with The Sweatbox, I was expecting something so much worse from its reputation), but the Simpsons universe does seem to be a whole lot more flexible and surreal in this particular take. It feels like a slightly different vision for the same show, closer in spirit to some of those early Tracy Ullman shorts than the quasi-realistic approach the producers were seeking for the series. Like those Ullman shorts, it has an affinity for ugliness, and for slightly strange sight gags - there's a particularly striking one where we see Marge retreating dejectedly down a corridor, having been unceremoniously deserted by her ungrateful clan, and the whole set-up seems spatially disorientating, like something out of M.C. Escher. I think it's an effective means of illustrating Marge's domestic oppression, but probably a bit too way-out for The Simpsons. Incidentally, the moment where Homer and Marge dance actually looks really good in the initial version, which was apparently a problem in of itself, as the script had stipulated their movements be awkward in order to convey that they hadn't danced together in years. (In the final version it's possibly a mite too awkward.)

On the DVD commentary, they estimate that at least 70% of the final episode consisted of retooled animation, but the surviving 30% from that traumatic first screening goes a long way, and "Some Enchanted Evening" may well be the most singularly grotesque-looking installment in the series' run. The characters' faces contort in ways that seem positively monstrous now - in particular, there's that unsightly Moe close-up in which his facial features, gargoyle-esque at the best of times, are exaggerated to a near-horrifying degree. I actually don't think it hurts the episode at all; as a self-contained installment, I think the looser animation compliments the story's slightly more off-kilter mood, and it is interesting seeing a marginally different visual interpretation for how the series might have gone - although in terms of commercial success it was obviously for the best that they were able to rein in much of that outlandishness. The look "Enchanted" goes for is probably too much of an all-out freak show to appeal to mainstream sensibilities, but for those who revel in that kind of thing, it's quite the beautiful little nightmare.

Appropriately, "Enchanted" boasts a climactic revelation that feels straight out of a nightmare, when Bart, Lisa and Maggie find themselves in the company of a notorious marauder masquerading as a not-so-genial babysitter, while Homer and Marge are off attempting to reignite their fizzling romance with an evening of dinner, dancing and waterbed surfing. The fraudulent babysitter, Ms Botz (who was voiced by the late Penny Marshall, best known for playing Laverne in Happy Days and its spin-off Laverne & Shirley, and for her work as a feature film director), is a startling character, in that she comes off as genuinely dangerous in a way that no other Simpsons antagonist ever really was - as a result, she's constantly giving off this air of having wandered in from a different show altogether, or as if she's attempting to pull the series in a direction that it's not so set on going. Certainly, I don't think there's any other point in the first season in which the children feel as immediately imperiled as the sequence in which Ms Botz stalks Bart and Lisa and flushes them from their respective hiding places down in the basement and beneath the kitchen table. But before Ms Botz even enters the picture we have to deal with another, more mundane but no less potent threat to the family's domestic stability, and one that won't be so readily dispelled as a light-fingered home intruder - that is, the tepid state of relations between Homer and Marge, a problem which has evidently been in the making for well over a decade. When we join the family at the start of the episode (and what should have been the start of the series), we find the household already in decline, with Homer so at ease with his assumed stability that he sees little reason to even acknowledge Marge, and Marge beginning to seriously question her life choices. The uncouth manners of the children aren't helping matters, but it's Marge's disillusionment at the gradual devolution of her husband since marriage that's really troubling her. The relationship between the Simpson parents was never explored in the Ullman shorts, where Marge was so infrequently the focus that her name was never even revealed, but once the family moved into longer-form storytelling it was swiftly established as one of the series' most enduring narrative threads. Here, it serves largely to set the events of the episode into motion; Marge is so distraught following one morning too many of her family's ingratitude that she's compelled to call into a radio show hosted by popular shrink Dr Marvin Monroe, who urges her to inform her husband that she won't stick around if he's not able to get his act together (Monroe puts words in Marge's mouth, but she nevertheless responds with such hot-blooded fervor that's clear that he's stoked some long-repressed rage of hers). As chance would have it, Homer hears the broadcast on the job, and is so freaked out that he retreats to Moe's Tavern in order to put off the problem by staying away from the house for as long as possible; Moe, however, convinces him that there is a far more productive and genteel method of putting off the problem, by taking Marge out for dinner, then to a motel, and hoping that she'll be so momentarily satiated that she'll forget about her deeper grievances for the time being. The solution is certainly no long-term fix, as anyone even remotely familiar with the rest of the series can attest, and lo, the very same problem would resurface again in "Life on The Fast Lane", where it gets to be the full focus of the episode. On that note, there is a slight curiosity - when Marge calls into Dr Marvin Monroe's radio show in "Some Enchanted Evening", she gives her age as 34, which is how old she turns in "Life on The Fast Lane". And since "Some Enchanted Evening" technically should come first in terms of the series' internal chronology, this raises questions. Either this was a straight-up continuity error, Marge's age was altered in order to account for the episode rearrangement (although I very much doubt that they would take the trouble for such a minor detail) or, most likely, Marge is perpetually 34, in the way that Bart is perpetually 10 and Lisa perpetually 8. She isn't getting any older, much as she isn't likely to escape her rut any time soon.

The central irony in "Some Enchanted Evening" is that, in staving off one threat to his domestic security, Homer ends up letting in quite another, and in this case it's the kids who have to pick up the slack and prevent the household from being torn apart, albeit in a more material sense. But in that regard Ms Botz ends up functioning as the perfect metaphor, in being this insidious destructiveness that's always nestled not far beneath the veneer of calm respectability. While all this is unfolding down in Evergreen Terrace, Homer and Marge are drifting peacefully through their enchanted evening; their tranquility is obviously intended to contrast with the ordeal the kids are suffering in their absence, but it's also evocative of the idea that they assume their troubles are all over, when there is one festering at this very moment. From the start, The Simpsons took delight in desecrating the established ideals of the conventional family sitcom, and what better way of illustrating that than with a marriage on the rocks in the (intended) very first episode, a problem which, by the end of the outing, has been remedied through the sleaziest, most superficial means possible, while the Babysitter Bandit steals off into the night, ready to strike again on some other enchanted evening (although she's yet to show up at the Simpsons' door again - nor does it seem likely that she will following the sad loss of Marshall in 2018). There are some issues that just won't be solved so readily within the space of twenty-two minutes, and the world is no safer at the end of the episode than when this particular misadventure began, although Marge suggests that they should at least take comfort in the fact that their offspring's capacity for hell-raising - qualities that have earned them so much scorn from the local babysitting community - made them such Grade A vigilantes. (Incidentally, Lisa's characterisation is closer here to her depiction on The Tracey Ullman Show than the general series - she and Maggie are apparently regarded as as much of a menace as Bart by the Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service, and she is complicit in Bart's prank calls to Moe, although we do see evidence of her blossoming melancholia when she mournfully compares Bart to Chilly, The Elf Who Cannot Love.)

I'd say that "Enchanted", more so than any other episode of Season 1, has a fascination with surrounding the family with this aura of banality, a sort of vapidity disguised as harmony that seems purposely designed to downplay the uglier truths of day-to-day living. We sense this in the incongruously bland elevator music that accompanies KBBL's promotional spot encouraging listeners to call in with their personal problems, trappings that seem curiously at odds with the spectacle of human misery being reeled in and packaged as mindless entertainment for anyone who might care to listen. Their grief becomes background noise, or reassurance for the schadenfreude-starved that their own lives are comparatively orderly. Homer will avidly listen to the "wackos" so desperate for affirmation that they would call into Monroe's show, so long as he can be confident that a safe buffer exists between his own world and the hidden disarray he hears about only from a seemingly comfortable distance. When that disarray suddenly intrudes into his personal reality, it becomes as terrifying as when, later on, Botz reveals her true intentions and the alleged cinéma vérité of America's Most Armed and Dangerous begins manifesting directly in the family living room. Furthermore, the universality of this one wacko's plight is underscored when the indifferent producer to Monroe's show categorises her, in his written prompts, as "another unappreciated housewife". Marge's deep-seated personal grievances amount to one of many identical stories in a world where individual despair is seldom heard - much less acknowledged - above a constant slew of easy listening and barely intelligible traffic reports. (Note: if you're particularly sharp-eyed, you might also notice that waiting on Line 2 is Paul, 51, who is a nail biter, not his own).

This vapidity is enforced even more pointedly through the contrast between the show we're watching and the insipidness of the Happy Little Elves videotape the children are made to view under Botz's watch. I mentioned in my coverage of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" that the Ullman shorts and some of the earlier episodes featured this in-universe media franchise called The Happy Little Elves, which was beloved by Lisa and Maggie but reviled by Bart, who found the cartoon way too saccharine for his rebellious tastes. The Happy Little Elves basically stopped appearing after the first season - we still had the occasional reference here and there, but they ceased to be a prominent fixture of the Simpsons universe a la fellow show-within-a-show Itchy & Scratchy. One reason for their relatively fast fade into obscurity, I suspect, is that the specific kind of cartoon they were lampooning - cute, highly merchandisable programs about wholesome characters learning wholesome lessons - became less relevant as the world entered the 1990s. It was more of an 1980s thing, what with Snorks, Care Bears and The Get Along Gang all being rampant and numbing the world to the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. In the beginning, The Simpsons took on that brand of cartoon as a means of declaring that they were radically different from the kinds of animated series that had dominated the cultural landscape of the 80s (while still being every bit as merchandisable), although it has to be said that The Simpsons was considerably less savage in its mockery of that entire ilk than was Rugrats, which yielded the Dummi Bears, about as viciously unsubtle a send-up of the Care Bears as one could imagine. Here, things take an interesting twist when Bart finally tires of the elves' antics and switches over to America's Most Armed and Dangerous, a pastiche of America's Most Wanted, the show that The Simpsons would later scramble into bed with in the run-up to the second half of their "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter in 1995. Ostensibly, this is the antithesis of everything the Elves have to offer; Bart assures Lisa that, "This is cinéma vérité; when the brutal, slow motion killing starts I'll tell you to shut your eyes". A small scratch beneath the surface, however, and it becomes apparent that America's Most Armed and Dangerous is really just a part of the same cycle of banality, in which domestic stability is exemplified by material acquisition and consumerism - the Babysitter Bandit is deemed a menace not because she traumatises her young charges by gagging and binding them while she raids their houses, but because she depletes their property of the "valuable objects it took the family a lifetime to shop for." As menacing as Botz is, what she does to the children unfortunate enough to be left in her care is really just a means to an end - she attacks the households she infiltrates right where it hurts, by stripping them of the superficial comforts that make their humdrum existences vaguely tolerable. Once again, the spectacle of human misery becomes the feeding ground for mindless entertainment, with the especially ludicrous detail that anyone who assists the program in successfully apprehending the advertised criminals is promised an inane incentive in the form of a free t-shirt.

Ultimately, the kids use the insipid little Elves as a weapon against Ms Botz when, having subdued and hogtied her, they force her to watch the tape while they're out contacting America's Most Armed and Dangerous from a public payphone, Ms Botz having destroyed the telephone line earlier (it is interesting that they would opt to contact the series and not the authorities directly - why would Lisa go to the effort of dialing that ridiculous number instead of 911? - which I suppose speaks volumes of the family's reverence for the chattering cyclops as the ultimate authority figure). Homer and Marge return to find the defenceless Botz in a wall-eyed state, numbly begging for them to turn off the tape, for the hardened criminal is truly appalled by the horrors of the Elves' artificial sunniness. At the end, we get what appears to be a moment of genuine affinity between Botz and Homer - although she is perfectly happy to accept triple her pay and a couple of suitcases' worth of the family's personal belongings, Botz does afford her unsuspecting victim a smidgen of respect when she warns him not to underestimate his son. This is seemingly her way of thanking Homer for aiding her escape, but also her acknowledgement that there are more treacherous forces at work in this world than even she's prepared for, although she speeds away before a sympathetic Homer can air his own grievances at Bart - there are limits to how far their solidarity can go, given that she's just pillaged this man's home. Shortly after, the press and the authorities arrive, and Homer's gaffe becomes apparent. Homer is dubbed a "local boob" by the local media, but thinking it over I feel that he's served kind of a raw deal at the end of this episode. Under the circumstances, it's not an altogether unreasonable mistake to make, and the people who should feel really embarrassed are the dupes at Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service for employing this woman in the first place; were background checks really this slack back in 1989?

So ends "Some Enchanted Evening", the episode that came notoriously close to sinking the series before it even began, and instead survives as a funny little footnote to the first season, conspicuously out of joint in terms the show's chronology, and slightly out of step with the rest of the season with regard to how far it's prepared to go with both its dark subject matter and its cartoon flexibility. The note is ends on is dually unsettling, with the Babysitter Bandit at large and, more subtly, uncertainty as to how long the rekindled romance between Marge and Homer can reasonably hope to last. But the final observation is one of perverse optimism, with Marge suggesting that the family's anti-social quirks may have left them better equipped for survival in a world so precarious. In other words, the family's dysfunctionality is really the mark of adaptability. All the same, the ability to knock out and hogtie a total stranger was, thankfully, not one that the Simpsons children would be required to use again too often. By the time this episode finally aired, the world was moving on, and we were already into the non-threatening nineties, after all.

* According to Albert Brooks, he does have the three hours' worth of unused ad libbed material between Marge and Jacques from "Life on The Fast Lane" sealed away in that same vault (A. Brooks is quoted as saying as such in John Ortved's book Simpsons Confidential). So obviously we're storming that vault one day.

The Sweatbox (aka It's Always Sunny In Burbank)

When The Emperor's New Groove opened in December 2000 to muted fanfare and lukewarm box office, it signified something of an end of an era for animation aficionados. Not only did the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s appear to be slowing to a grinding crawl - for as much money as their pictures continued to garner through the latter half of the decade, in terms of box office gross and cultural impact the Mouseketeers had consistently failed to engineer the next Lion King - there were signs all around that traditional Hollywood animation might be in trouble. The rival animation studios that had been established in the mid-90s in response to Disney's second coming generally weren't picking up the pace where interest in Disney was sagging, at least where their 2D output was concerned. The most prominent of these new rivals, DreamWorks Animation, founded by former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, had experienced a promising start with The Prince of Egypt back in 1998, but their follow-up effort, The Road to El Dorado, had crashed and burned earlier that spring. They had more success that summer with the stop motion Chicken Run, a co-production with Aardman Animations, an early hint that general audiences were starting to gravitate away from the Disney model that had dominated the industry for so long and craved a fresh new look (even if it didn't lie with stop motion animation in the long-term). The real chimes of doom, though, seemed to be coming from Disney's own bedfellows at Pixar, who now had three feature hits under their belt, having been around for long enough to have established themselves as a brand name name in their own right and to demonstrate that their early success with Toy Story in 1995 was no fluke. Katzenberg too sensed which way the winds were blowing, and he was ready to capitalise on it - Shrek would debut in just a matter of months, and after that the face of Hollywood animation would never be the same. Disney animation was about to take a serious tumble from grace, and The Emperor's New Groove was to be the first notable casualty in all of this. Not exactly helping the film's PR was the fact that Disney themselves didn't seem to be too enthusiastic about it - in the tail-end of 2000 they gave priority to promoting 102 Dalmatians, their big Thanksgiving release, and The Emperor's New Groove was treated as something of an afterthought. It was clear that Disney regarded this one as a B-picture, rather than the must-see event they had hotly proclaimed their preceding Renaissance fare - one you could safely sit out unless you were a Disney completist or a parent in need of an 80-minute babysitter.

So it was that The Emperor's New Groove failed to leave much of a dent within its theatrical lifespan. And yet when the film was released on home video in 2001, word started to get round that, if you had skipped this one when it played in theatres (odds are that you did), then your loss entirely. Because it's actually rather a good little picture. Shockingly good, in fact. The discs started circulating, people who entered in with low expectations came out grinning, and before you knew it the film that nobody cared about suddenly had an avid legion of adoring fans. The Emperor's New Groove still isn't regarded as one of Disney's heavy-hitters, but it is without doubt one of their most vibrant, their most quotable and their most authentically, consistently funny. If you ask me, it holds up infinitely better than Shrek.

Most Disney aficionados were well aware of the picture's troubled history. It was common knowledge that the film was initially conceived as Kingdom of The Sun, an epic reworking of the Mark Twain classic The Prince and The Pauper set against the backdrop of Inca mythology. The film was to have been directed by Roger Allers, coming off the back of his 1994 smash hit The Lion King (which he co-directed with Rob Minkoff, after original director George Scribner dropped out due to creative differences). Owen Wilson was at one point down to play Pacha, the humble peasant who meets his doppelganger in Manco, a spoiled but frustrated young emperor voiced by David Spade. The two of them trade places, only for malefic villainess Yzma (Eartha Kitt) to get wise to the switcheroo and transform Manco into a (non-talking) llama, so that she can control Pacha as a puppet ruler, threatening to expose the deception if he doesn't comply with her demands (which involved destroying the sun so that she can regain her lost beauty - I'm sure it all made sense in context). Meanwhile, Pacha falls in love with Nina (Carla Gugino), Manco's betrothed, but fears that she would not reciprocate should she discover his true identity. The film was to have featured songs written by English rock musician Sting (with collaborator David Hartley), in an effort to replicate the Oscar-winning success Elton John had bestowed on The Lion King. For a while, the film looked set to be another musical-adventure in the now-familiar Renaissance mold.

Then something went seriously awry with Allers' project during production. Things didn't appear to be becoming together as planned, and Allers was reportedly reluctant to make concessions. A co-director, Mark Dindal, was brought on in 1997 in the hopes that he could bring balance to Allers' vision (Allers himself had previously been the supplementary co-director for The Lion King with Scribner, giving him a bitter new perspective on The Circle of Life). Allers ultimately left the production, and the project was apparently in real jeopardy of being terminated altogether until Dindal, along with producer Randy Fullmer and writer David Reynolds, was able to re-imagine the entire scenario as a sort of feature-length love letter to the work of Chuck Jones. It was a radical shake-up compared to the film Allers had aspired to make, but it worked, and the project was salvaged. The film emerged as The Emperor's New Groove, only six months behind Kingdom of The Sun's allotted release in the summer of 2000 (a slot instead filled by Dinosaur, Disney's early flirtation with 3D animation). Some key elements of the original narrative survived in the finished production - notably, Yzma turning Manco, now renamed Kuzco, into a llama (unintentionally, in this version) as part of an underhanded scheme to usurp the throne, although Yzma's obsession with regaining her beauty was dropped and she no longer bore any ill will toward the sun. Pacha's character was heavily altered - he was now a middle-aged family man voiced by John Goodman - although the basic plot point about an unassuming peasant teaching an arrogant emperor how to rule remained intact. But in most other respects the story was transmuted beyond recognition. The Inca setting, which had so fascinated Allers, was now basically incidental, the character of Nina was completely abandoned and the film's Prince and The Pauper connection was no more. As a consequence of this extensive overhaul, all of the songs Sting had prepared for Kingdom of The Sun were discarded, since they were no longer pertinent to the story in question. Sting was understandably disappointed by this development, but remained attached to the project and wrote two new songs which were used in the final picture, although the film was not a traditional musical as Allers had envisioned.

It's worth acknowledging that The Emperor's New Groove was not the only Disney production to have suffered such severe gestation troubles, although it was a particularly extreme example. I've already alluded to the difficulties that Scribner had in getting his vision for The Lion King, then titled King of The Jungle, off the ground, and in that instance, it was Allers who ultimately saved the production. It's also well-known what an absolute nightmare Toy Story was at one time shaping up to be under the guidance of Katzenberg. But not only was The Emperor's New Groove light-years apart from the film Allers was aspiring to make, there was an unusually juicy twist in all of this, in that this deluge of behind-the-scenes trauma had been captured and preserved by outside forces and was, at one point, intended for public exhibition. See, when Sting had first agreed to come on board and do the project, he had done so on the condition that his wife, film-maker Trudie Styler, would be permitted to document the production process. Styler, along with her co-director John-Paul Davidson, were present and filming while many of these unpleasant decisions were being made, including the critical moment where Sting received confirmation from Fullmer that all of his song-writing work was about to be canned. Styler had captured Disney with their pants down and their hands chopped off (an analogy one person actually makes in the film), and the results, Dame Hearsay had it, were far from pretty.

Styler's project was ultimately assembled into a feature documentary called The Sweatbox (named for the screening room established by Disney at his studio in Burbank). It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, and played in a tiny number of other select venues in the festival circuit. For a while this was the only glimpse of daylight the poor picture ever got, except in cherry-picked snippets which showed up here and there on "making of" featurettes on home media releases of The Emperor's New Groove. Word began circulate that Disney were deliberately holding Styler's film captive because they were concerned that it painted a less-than-flattering image of the company - particularly executives Tom Schumacher and Peter Schneider, who were essentially the villains of the piece, if Mouse Planet writer Wade Sampson was to be believed. Sampson, who had attended a screening of The Sweatbox at the Florida Film Festival, wrote an article that for years dominated the general public's impression of the film. And while Sampson acknowledged that he did not consider the film to be "anti-Disney", for a period he almost single-handedly bolstered the mythos that The Sweatbox had been locked away in the Vault because it represented such a deep personal embarrassment to Schneider and Schumacher. Says Sampson:

"At the late night screening I attended, every time Tom Schumacher, then president of Disney Feature Animation, or Peter Schneider, then the Disney Studios chairman, appeared on the screen, there were howls from the audience that was partly composed of animators from Disney Feature Animation Florida.

The two executives did come across as nerdy bullies who really didn't seem to know what was going on when it came to animation and were unnecessarily hurtful and full of politically correct speech. They looked like the kids in high school that jocks gave a "wedgie" to on a daily basis. How much of that impression was due to editing and how much was a remarkable truthful glimpse is up to the viewer to decide."

Firstly, it is funny how convinced Sampson seems that the jocks who gave wedgies to nerds on a daily basis were the real victims and the kids they so mercilessly abused had it coming. That is one heck of an unpleasant analogy. Secondly, I'd bear in mind that those animators who heckled the executives during the Florida screening would have inevitably brought their own emotional baggage along with them. Perhaps Schneider and Schumacher really were as difficult to work with as Sampson suggests, but whether that's what's actually represented in the film or Sampson was simply responding to the energy of that particular audience is a whole other matter.

So yes, some of what Sampson wrote was always highly questionable, but back in 2007 we didn't have any reason to believe that the basic essence of what he was saying - that Disney were locking this one away in the vault for all eternity because it presented an overwhelmingly negative impression of the company - was anything other than true. Surely Disney must have had something to hide, or why else would they want to bury it? We likewise had little reason to believe that we would ever have the chance to see The Sweatbox for ourselves and form our own opinions, because how could Disney be expected to change their minds on such a thing? And as it turns out, they didn't. But life found a way regardless. One fateful day in March 2012 The Sweatbox randomly appeared online, albeit as a work print with a big intrusive timecode slapped across the bottom, and the internet erupted into a tirade of, "QUICKLY! GRAB IT! DON'T LET IT GET AWAY!" The video was subsequently removed by the YouTube police, but by then everyone with an interest in the documentary had already created their own copy and there was no going back. I understand that the work print in question had a different opening to the finalised version, and there are no end-credits, but otherwise I think that the picture unexpectedly bestowed on us was more-or-less the same as what those festival-goers saw back in 2002. The Documentary That Disney Didn't Want You To See now belonged to The People. This was a moment in history. We were about to gaze into the deep dark abyss of Disney production and see that sordid underbelly they were so determined to shield from public view.

Or not, because the resounding reaction, once the film had been seen by enough eyes around the web, was, "Really? That's it? What was all the fuss about?" As it turns out, there was nothing in the least bit scandalous about The Sweatbox. What we had was a brutally honest account of how the Disney magic gets made and the terminal drudgery that accompanies the process, but nothing more defamatory than that. Based on the rumors, I think a lot of us were expecting screaming matches, animators throwing paint at executives, producers and screenwriters being locked in offices together until they reached an agreement, and an all-round hurricane of blood, sweat, tears and tantrums. Certainly, there is a very strong sense throughout of all parties struggling to keep their emotions in check and to avoid being forthright about what's actually on their mind. But, you know, that all comes with the territory of being a professional. Sensibilities are tested, hearts are broken, ambitions are thwarted, but such is the reality of the creative process within the studio system. And given the absolute wringer that Disney put her husband through, Styler's film absolutely does not come across as the work of a person with an axe to grind. The much-hyped moment in which Fullmer communicates to Sting the bad news that his songs were now unusable is there, and it's an uncomfortable scene for sure, in which you can really feel Sting's deflation seeping through, but it's nowhere near as squeamish as you might expect. If anything, The Sweatbox endeavors to elicit tremendous admiration for the fact that the various individuals attached to the project were able to weather so many setbacks and still have a product at the end of it all, even if said product bore little resemblance to the one they had initially set out to make.

As for Schneider and Schumacher...based on his wording, I'm not convinced that Sampson actually understands what "politically correct" means, as it's not really an apt description of anything the so-called nerdy bullies are saying here. What I think he's getting at is that Schneider and Schumacher are blatantly choosing their words carefully so that they can lambaste Allers' work whilst retaining a guise of friendliness and enthusiasm, but...I'll refer back to what I said earlier about being a professional. And I really am scratching my head as to what point in the documentary they are "unnecessarily hurtful". Let's put it another way - do Schneider and Schumacher ever come across as wheedling and insincere? Yes, absolutely they do. There is one moment in particular where Schneider, following the disastrous test screening of Kingdom of The Sun, talks about how this is all part of the process and how you have to go through what doesn't work to find out what does - which, contrasted with Allers' more winded response, is liable to prompt a viewer reaction of "Well, that's easy for you to say. You're not the one who just had your labour of love ripped apart." But at the same time, The Sweatbox never infers that what Schneider and Schumacher are doing is anything less than what their own jobs demand - ie: the onus is on them to oversee a production that will perform well for the company.

If stories of the picture's salaciousness turned out to be wildly exaggerated, then why were Disney so keen to keep the public from ever seeing this one? We can only speculate. Maybe Disney just didn't appreciate the joke implicit in the film's title (sure, it's a direct reference to the Disney screening room, but it also functions as a not-very-subtle nod to the arduous and emotionally trying time the crew had making this film). Perhaps the underwhelming response to The Emperor's New Groove in 2000 played a part, as the film's failure, at least in the short-term, possibly made their decisions therein look foolish and misguided. Maybe the reaction at the very screening attended by Sampson convinced them that the film was more defamatory than it was. Or maybe Sting's biting assessment of the Disney ethos simply cut a little too close to the bone? "I'm alloyed to this organisation that seems to want to take the best of different cultures and suck them up and then spit them out into something that's like a hamburger." Having uttered that very damning statement, Sting immediately tries to take the edge off by admitting that he doesn't think this is actually their intention, but I don't think I ever heard a more astute summary of the Disney brand, particularly Renaissance era Disney, where the process of McDonaldization swiftly took a hold, and their output began to feel as calculated and unnutritious as the Happy Meals they were at least partially designed to sell. (As a disclaimer, I like all of the Renaissance films except Hercules, which is pure 100% celluloid Happy Meal, but I'm not above the occasional good-hearted jibe at their expense.)

To my mind, The Sweatbox is an important film. It's the most thorough and candid insight we're ever likely to get into the Disney film-making process, one that feels worlds apart from the self-congratulatory fluff pieces that constitute "making of" featurettes on the company's official media releases, and that makes it a must-see for any Disney fanatic. I'm glad it was made, I consider it doubly fortuitous that it happened to be made about this film in particular, given how radically the picture was transmuted during production, and I'm endlessly grateful to the plucky anonymous who enabled it to miraculously escape the Vault. After watching The Sweatbox for the first time, I had only one key complaint, and that's that it didn't reveal nearly enough about Allers' original vision for my liking. The glimpses we got were titillating but they merely whetted my appetite. But then if I'm totally honest, I'm not convinced that anything less than the full animatic that played so disastrously to Schneider and Schumacher would have satisfied that craving. That's what I really wanted to see, dammit. I wanted to know exactly where this was headed so that I could judge for myself who was right and who was wrong - particularly as the majority of criticisms we hear from Schneider and Schumacher on the subject are so infuriatingly vague. But having watched the film numerous times, and knowing Renaissance era's various tics and eccentrics as I do, I think that we actually get a sufficient enough inkling as to why Allers' picture wasn't working. There's one comment in particular from producer Don Hahn that I suspect summarises what was going wrong for Kingdom of The Sun in perfect little nutshell:

"The frustrating thing about this film is that there are so many great elements. If I sat down to describe it to you and said, oh we have this movie set in Peru, and by the way Sting's doing the music, and there's Eartha Kitt, and by the way David Spade's in it too, you'd be going, oh my god, where do I go, how can I give my money to go see this movie? And so it's incredibly frustrating when we look at it and say why aren't the pieces coming together? Where's my movie?"

Think back to what I said about McDonaldization, and to Sting's hypothetical hamburger. By this point in the Renaissance, Disney had grown accustomed to creating films according to a specific formula - a sort of one-size-fits-all model into which any folklore or cultural mythology could be fed, ground down, processed and reassembled into a highly marketable and digestible package (Sting's hamburger analogy seems particularly witty, given that Disney films inevitably set out to present their reiterations of classic stories, no matter what their cultural origin, in a manner that seemed cosy, familiar and entirely unchallenging to Western sensibilities). The ideal Disney picture, according to the Renaissance model, would be one that incorporated a princess (or nearest possible equivalent), a campy villain, a SNL comedian somewhere within the cast, some form of animal sidekick who could guarantee a run of plush toys, a love song, a comic song, a song in which the villain lays out their nefarious scheme, and lashings upon lashings of awe-inspiring eye candy. It seems that Kingdom of The Sun was indeed going for all of those, and I suspect that's where they tripped themselves up - they were so concerned with the various fragments, and with ensuring that all of the items on the Disney checklist were accounted for, that they were giving less attention to the way it gelled as a cohesive whole. On that basis, I can buy that Allers' project, while undoubtedly assembled with love and passion, was as messy and unfocused as Schneider and Schumacher indicate that it was. At the start of the film, Allers recalls how, when he first pitched his outline to Michael Eisner, he was assured that it has "all the elements of a Disney classic", which with hindsight might have been an early sign of doom. It's this obsession with manufacturing Disney classics via obligatory elements that led to some of the more questionable decisions of the later Renaissance fare - eg: the three animate gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, who feel wildly out of place in what would otherwise have been one of Disney's darker and more ambitious pictures, but were there because wisecracking sidekicks voiced by popular comedians were a requisite.

In spite of the difficulties he faced in bringing the elements together, Allers was reluctant to drop a single one, believing that he could make it work if given sufficient time. When Dindal took over as the project's sole director, he was more open to making sacrifices in order to streamline the narrative, and one of the elements he figured the story ultimately didn't need was the romantic arc with Pacha and Nina. We learn effectively nothing of lost Disney princess Nina in The Sweatbox, other than what's evident in the love song Sting prepared ("One Day She'll Love Me", which still appears on the official soundtrack release), although one jettisoned character we do gain a little flavour of is Hucua, Yzma's sidekick, who was ultimately replaced by Kronk in the finished film. It's never stated in The Sweatbox, but he would have been voiced by Harvey Fierstein - there's a point in the documentary where we see a short animated sequence of Hucua saying, "This time I'm putting my foot down!", and there's no mistaking those vocals for anybody else. Fierstein, of course, is a highly esteemed person around these parts, since he also voiced Karl in the Simpsons episode "Simpson and Delilah", and I must admit that my loyalties here are somewhat divided. I think that Patrick Warburton is wonderful and hilarious as Kronk and I couldn't possibly imagine Disney's llama flick without him. On the other hand, we could have had Harvey Fierstein. So I don't know what to think. At least Fierstein got to voice Yao in Mulan, so he wasn't completely squeezed out of the Disney legacy. Oh and, incidentally, if you're a Yzma/Kronk shipper then congratulations - your ship is confirmed as canon in The Sweatbox. At the very least, animator Joe Moshier seems to be under the impression that Kronk is "Yzma's boyfriend".

The gradual transition of the picture from Kingdom of The Sun to The Emperor's New Groove (and Kingdom in The Sun somewhere in between) is absolutely fascinating to watch. The painful part comes in seeing the artists who've put their hearts into their allotted contributions discover that it was all for nought, and that they now have two options - begin again from the beginning or exit the project (which they might have to do, if their particular contribution was no longer relevant). In addition to Sting and Allers, there's animator Andreas Deja, who at the start of the documentary talks with great enthusiasm about how being assigned Yzma is "a dream come true" for him, because he's always wanted to animate a female villain. Deja clearly backs Allers' vision - before that terrible test screening, he voices his confidence that the story is "tight, terrific and entertaining". As the transmutation process gets underway, Deja reflects on his initial relief that Yzma was still in the picture at all, but his frustration that she was no longer the same sun-loathing, immortality-chasing narcissist he had grown so invested in animating, as her obsession with youth and beauty was what really captivated him about the character. "I would have gone all the way with that," he admits ruefully. (Deja ultimately quit the production and went to work on Lilo & Stitch, while Dale L. Baer took over as Yzma's animator.) Eartha Kitt seems more divided. She muses that the Yzma Allers came up with was "more profound" and had "more native intelligence", but also admits to enjoying Dindal's more simplified, comedic take on the character. "I adore her, because she goes after what she wants, and even though she gets a bit obstreperous about it...in the end I think you end up liking her." Elsewhere, other artists are being led around in circles as the revised narrative is being ironed out and various story elements are switched around and retooled on a daily basis, and many of them aren't even certain if they still have jobs or not. Among them is Doug Frankel, the animator assigned to working on Chicha, Pacha's wife. The preliminary screening for The Emperor's New Groove goes a whole lot better than that for Kingdom of The Sun, although Schneider and Schumacher are at odds with the story team as to whether Pacha should have a family at all, believing that their scenes are dead weight as far as the narrative is concerned, and Frankel's work hangs persistently in the balance as they barter this out between them. Frankel gets used to saying, "Whatever's best for the movie", to the point that it clearly loses all meaning. (In the end, the creative team wins this particular round, and Chicha makes it all the way into the final picture.)

It's a slow and bewildering process, but at long last things seem to be looking up for the troubled production. There is, however, one further and particularly bitter clash on the horizon, this time between Sting and the production team. Sting expresses dissatisfaction with the film's original ending, which sees Kuzco spare Pancho's village, but build his eyesore of a leisure resort anyway, on a neighbouring hill, thus desecrating the local environs and polluting the landscape with his continued self-indulgence. In other words, Kuzco doesn't really change too much in this version of the story, and the ostensible message of a common man teaching an arrogant man about leadership ends up feeling a mite insincere. Was this an intentional move (albeit a somewhat misjudged one) from a film that refused point blank to take itself in the slightest bit seriously, or was the picture really that thoughtless about the implications of its ending? We see a meeting in which Schneider and Schumacher discuss Sting's objections with Dindal and Fullmer, and they all talk about how great it is to have this additional feedback. Roy Disney is also suddenly there and...you know, I must confess that I've never been able to look at him in quite the same way ever since seeing his highly unpleasant remarks on the company's history of animal abuse in the 1982 documentary Cruel Camera. Never mind Schneider and Schumacher; if I'm going to howl at and heckle anyone on screen, it's Roy. Thankfully he's not there long.

It's here that Sting delivers his damning hamburger analogy. As noted, he immediately doubles back on it, but for a moment it's as if he's cut through the lie and exposed Disney, in the most naked possible terms, for what it really is - that is, a giant corporation eager to trample over everything, make the world into its personal amusement park and affix unsightly little mouse ears to all. Suddenly that alternate ending, in which Kuzco purports to be bringing the community together in their mutual pursuit of wholesome family fun, but is merely satisfying his own egotistical ends by stripping down the world around them and reconstructing it in his own image, plays like the most uncomfortable of Freudian slips. Disney rethinks the ending and changes it to the one we see in the final film, in which Kuzco abandons plans for his resort altogether and, in lieu of rebuilding the world in his own image, chooses to assimilate himself into the local culture and form a sincere connection with the villagers. In spite of the prickliness of this particular moment, The Sweatbox does not settle upon an anti-Disney stance, and closes out with Sting making the following reflection: "I have to say, as much as I've bitched and moaned about having to write for a committee, and having a censor, an artistic censor, every time that I've had to go back and work it, it's better, it's gone better. So if I'm being honest I have to say the process does work."

Inevitably, The Emperor's New Groove will always be one of Disney's most divisive animated features. Many believe that Allers was given a rough ride by the suits and could have produced a masterpiece on a par with the best of the Renaissance era had the studio trusted in his vision. Others argue that the Disney Renaissance was already wearing itself into the ground through over-familiarity and laud The Emperor's New Groove for bringing something wildly fresh to the table. Personally, I have a foot in both camps. I've got a lot of sympathy for Allers - there's no doubt in my mind that he cared passionately about the film he was making, perhaps even to a fault - but I also love The Emperor's New Groove and would be extremely resistant toward the idea of living in an alternate timeline where it doesn't exist.

One thing that's not evident from Styler's picture, and this is something that Allers' supporters are at pains to point out, is the full context as to what was going on with the Disney feature landscape post-Lion King. In between Allers' original hit and this particular project there was Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan and Tarzan. Those films generally did well at the box office, but not as well as Disney would have liked. The Disney Renaissance was already in danger of going stale, and there was additional pressure on Allers amid all of that to deliver something more commercial. His intentions for Kingdom - epic, spectacular, serious, ambitious - skewed too close to the Pocahontas and Hunchback model for the higher-ups' liking. From that perspective, one might hypothesise that Kingdom of The Sun really could have been as great a film as Allers believed it could be; it just wasn't the film that Disney desired at that point in time. Allers had his heart set on making the project as he had always conceived it, whereas Schneider and Schumacher, conscious of the company's waning box office, began pushing for something with a little less grandeur and a lot more fun. Although therein lies the paradox. Hercules was a zany action-comedy, closer in spirit to Aladdin than to the triad of epics that had fallen in between, and it performed relatively poorly by Renaissance standards. Eisner himself was reportedly nervous when he heard that The Emperor's New Groove would be an all-out comedy for that very reason. It surely wasn't a matter of how earnest and portentous versus how zany and light-hearted the pictures were - rather, I think audiences were tiring of Disney feature animation full-stop because the freshness was fading. They were beginning to feel more conspicuously like calculated products, with whatever spontaneity might have been lurking in those earlier productions carefully weeded out of them. Back in 1992, nobody had ever seen a performance in a mainstream animated feature quite like that which Robin Williams gave in Aladdin. By 1998, when Eddie Murphy was delivering a very similar kind of performance in Mulan, audiences knew the drill. The world had downed enough Happy Meals within the last few years, and it was numbing to the taste.

I'm emphasising this because, irrespective of how Allers' film would have turned out (and all of this talk about "elements" throughout The Sweatbox does instil me with trepidation), The Emperor's New Groove works precisely because it is so marvellously atypical for a Disney production, particularly coming off the back of the Renaissance era. Of all the animated features the company had put out since The Lion King, this one felt the least calculated, the most experimental and by far the most purely joyous. Gone was the tremendous sense of self-importance that had marred many a late 90s Disney production for numerous viewers (Hercules included); The Emperor's New Groove is unfussy and unassuming, and it's entirely at ease with how unfussy and unassuming it is. It doesn't bear the self-conscious air of a product designed to bait Oscars or sell fast food, but simply to generate as much ludicrous delight as possible from its farcical scenario. It didn't translate in terms of box office sales - by then, traditional Disney animation was too out of vogue, and Disney's own indifferent marketing strategies didn't help matters - but it did ensure that there'd be an appreciative audience for this film once the dust had settled. The Emperor's New Groove might always have been a little too quirky and off-centre for mainstream tastes, but its eccentricities have enabled to live on as fondly-regarded cult classic long after Disney's more prestigious productions for that year (Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur) were forgotten. Regardless of whether you side with Schneider and Schumacher, it has to be said there is a kind of irony in the fact that this degree of executive meddling, in this instance, resulted in one of the liveliest and most idiosyncratic Disney features of all-time.

There is, however, one misgiving that I have about The Emperor's New Groove. In 2014, Allers gave an interview to Italian animation site Fumetto Logica, in which he was asked about Kingdom of The Sun. He gave what I feel was a very sincere response in terms of the ill-fated production:

"The Kingdom of the Sun was such a heart-breaking experience for me. I put four years of my heart and energy into that one.  Though I may have seemed calm for the camera (as I always tried to be for my crew) inside it was a chaotic struggle resulting in annihilation.  I was creating an “epic” picture mixing elements of adventure, comedy, romance and mysticism. The head of Disney Features at the time was afraid that we were doing, in his opinion, too many films in the same vein."

He then says of the head of Disney Features:

"He was also uncomfortable with the spiritual and cultural (Inca) aspects of it."

This is an interesting revelation, as it's not something you see first-hand in The Sweatbox, and it's one that I do find very believable. Again, it goes back to what Sting says about different cultures and hamburgers, and how Disney simultaneously wanted the exoticism and mysticism of various cultural mythologies but nothing that could be perceived as too different or startling to American sensibilities (you see ample evidence of that in Hercules, where Hades is basically represented as Satan). As I previously noted, the Inca setting is entirely incidental to The Emperor's New Groove, informing only the most basic of world-building (emperor, llamas, etc). There's a moment in The Sweatbox where an unnamed female animator talks about the various rumours she's heard regarding the new narrative directions being debated for Kingdom of The Sun, among them that the story might be relocated to Nebraska and the llamas changed to sheep. I'm not sure quite how serious she's being on that point, but given how thoroughly uninterested the finished film is in the Incas themselves, such a transplant wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility. It stands to reason - it was Allers who was really fascinated with the idea of making a film about Inca mythology, and Dindal evidently didn't share his enthusiasm. The rapid-fire anachronistic humour is, of course, a huge part of the charm, and it works a whole lot better here than in Hercules, but this this is the one area in which The Emperor's New Groove does come across as glibly calculating - its total lack of passion for the subject at hand.

Really, though, if there's one thing that I'm inclined to take away from the whole Sweatbox saga, it's an infinite amount of admiration for just how consistent and cohesive a picture The Emperor's New Groove is, in light of just how difficult a time it had in the making. I mean, if you'd seen this film and knew nothing about its background, would you have guessed that it had such tortured origins? The only real hint, I feel, of its troubled production lies in how modest much of the animation is compared to other features of the era. There's nothing especially extravagant or showy about the visuals, cluing you in that this was done on the cheap. But in terms of narrative, character and humour, the whole thing flows smoothly from start to finish. There's no sense of any identity crisis, or of the film being cobbled together from various bits and pieces. It's a film that knows exactly what it wants to be, and sticks with it. For an example of a film that does wear its painful gestation upon its sleeve, you need look no further than DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado, which at one point seemed destined for a rivalry with Disney's Inca pic as vicious as that between A Bug's Life and Antz, but was ultimately hampered by its own extremely troubled production. The Road to El Dorado featured songs by Elton John and Tim Rice, in a conspicuous effort to replicate the success of The Lion King (as eager as Katzenberg was to really stick it to Disney, at this point he was also quite happy to leech off of their popularity). They feel curiously out of place in the finished film, however, as if they were intended for an earlier version of the story but were retained regardless because everybody knew that this was their big draw. Can you imagine if The Emperor's New Groove had done the same with Sting's original songs? Disney's approach may have been cutthroat, but it got way better results.