The Phonemaster 9000 Call Returning Machine (1992)

If you were at Sundance in 1993, then perhaps you had the opportunity to attend a screening of Michael Addis's short film The Phonemaster 9000 Call Returning Machine, a technological nightmare which pits Julie Larson's unsuspecting caller against the increasingly diabolical labyrinth of questions posed by the titular device (Addis himself), a Frankenstein creation which looks suspiciously like an amalgamation of a fax machine, TV antenna and a computer joystick. If not, then not to worry, as Addis has been a good enough sport to upload the short in its entirety to YouTube.

Addis's vision of clunky answerphone technology from the futuristic plains of hell is clearly of a different age, as is the film's rather disappointing punchline (in which Lesley finally pulls the plug on a prospective relationship with Bill not because he's a predatory creep but because of the implication that he's a bisexual predatory creep). The film never really makes good on the menace suggested by the ominous tones of its opening moments, yet it does succeed in maintaining an eerily uncomfortable vibe throughout, as Lesley's entirely banal efforts to initiate a relationship come back to bite her in the most coldly demeaning manner imaginable. Meanwhile, Addis brings just the right levels of frostiness to the impersonal tones of the automated device, as it whittles human relations down to a system of prompts apparently designed to move Lesley as quickly as possible into Bill's bed (after which, we suspect, she'd be pushed to a distance just as rapidly). As a concept it feels somewhat rough and underdeveloped (it was a student film, after all), but there's a certain degree of perverse pleasure to be had in its creation of a troublesome void where real human interaction should be. Besides, the Phonemaster itself is such a curious and quaint-looking device that it takes on an undeniable charm. I can only hope that the prop has since been stashed away safely in Addis's basement or somewhere; it would be a shame to think of a concoction this droll being wiped from all existence.

VHS Verve: The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze (2002)

(That Asda Price sticker stays.  You don't want to see what's behind it, trust me.)

Last month, when I reviewed the original theatrical The Land Before Time, I concluded that the film isn't anywhere near as good as you probably remember it being and then slipped in some reference to my failure, up until now, to make it through more than eight minutes of its first direct-to-video sequel.  Immediately after typing that, I felt something remarkable happening - that is, my prior indifference toward those LBT sequels suddenly started giving way to morbid curiosity.  I'd heard so many damning things about the sequels from Bluth devotees over the years - how much of an insult to the original they were, how insanely dragged out the series was, etc - that I began wondering exactly what I'd been missing out on all this time.   It occurred to me that, since I have very little lingering nostalgic attachment to the original and essentially no reverence for Bluth as an artist, I could, in theory, make the effort to check out some of those sequels in full without fear of desecrating something dear and sacred to my heart (which is more than I could do for a lot of those DTV Disney sequels they churned out for that icky period between 1994 and 2007, whose mere existence in many cases is enough to give me an aneurysm).  At the very least, I was curious to see exactly how they'd attempted to expand on what struck me as a paper-thin and fairly closed-ended story for multiple instalments.  So I grabbed hold of the first random LBT sequel I could get my hands on, and here we are.

The first thing I have to say is that upon reading the title, The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze, I was mildly shocked to note that this was movie number eight in the series.  As stated, I was aware that the LBT franchise was dragged out for insanely long, but I took that to mean that it got five or six instalments at most, which would have put it on a par with Blue Sky's inexplicably long-lived Ice Age franchise.  A quick google search revealed that there are actually fourteen of the damned things in total, the most recent of which was released in 2016, meaning that there could still be a whole more of these to come.  Also important to note is that, no matter what issues I might encounter the LBT sequels, I cannot, this time round, pin any of them on Bluth, who had zilch involvement with any of the LBT sequels - in fact, Bluth had no involvement with any sequels made to any of his films (and they are surprisingly plentiful, even when you take out the entire LBT franchise), with the single exception of Bartok The Magnificent (1999), a DTV spin-off to 1998's Anastasia.

Anyway, some context - in 1994, Disney debuted a spin-off TV series based on its then-recent box office smash Aladdin (1992) and made the tactical decision to release the feature-length pilot on video and market it as a sequel under the title The Return of Jafar.  Fans who expected something on a par with the original were bitterly disappointed when they got the damned thing home and were greeted with cut-price animation, tuneless musical numbers and a distinct lack of Robin Williams, but by then it was too late.  Eisner had their money and was already wise to what a little goldmine he'd just unearthed.  Disney's previous attempt at creating a sequel to one of its classics, The Rescuers Down Under (1990), had been a full-scale theatrical release and lavishly animated, but also a box office bomb (to the extent that, when people talk about the Disney Renaissance era, they tend to forget that The Rescuers Down Under was technically a part of it).  Why go to all that trouble and risk failure when this considerably cheaper strategy had gotten results?  It took a few years before we who bought The Return of Jafar (confession time: I was part of the problem, but it was the only DTV Disney sequel I ever bought, I swear) truly realised what horrors our greediness for more Aladdin had brought upon Disney's legacy.  The fall-out was so powerful and so toxic that it took until 2007 for someone (Lasseter) to put their foot down and say "Jesus Christ, people, enough!"  If there's a silver living to Disney's sequel plague, it's the infinite amount of petty amusement I get from contemplating that all of the films from the Renaissance era received sequels/midquels except Hercules (save The Rescuers Down Under, which was itself a sequel), which might say something about how well-regarded that film is behind the scenes at Disney.  The Fox and The Hound was deemed worthy of one of these things but not Hercules.  Come on, that's pretty hilarious.
 
I would have assumed that the success of The Return of Jafar was what inspired Universal Cartoon Studios to get aboard the DTV gravy train and start churning out sequels to The Land Before Time - however, another google search revealed that the first sequel, The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure, entered production in 1993 and was released in late 1994, suggesting that it was all just a great coincidence that we happened to get two separate bouts of sequelitis from two studios at once.  Over the years, Universal Cartoon Studios would attempt to branch out a little, giving us the odd DTV sequel to An American Tail, Balto and, in one particularly barrel-scraping example, Hanna Barbera's 1973 adaptation of Charlotte's Web (the title character is already dead, for eff's sake), but The Land Before Time is where the bulk of their bread and butter was sourced, and they stuck with it for as long as the DTV gravy train was running.  When DTV sequels fell out fashion with Disney in 2007, Universal Cartoon Studios also looked to be calling it quits, but they kept LBT going as a TV series for a further year, and recently released a new LBT sequel in 2016 (as Universal Animation Studios).  These dinosaurs just refuse to go extinct.

Here's the Universal Cartoon Studios logo:

I'm no fan of the sugar-cereal coloured lettering used on "Cartoon Studios" (way too kiddish), but the cartoon plane is innocuous enough, I suppose.

The copy I've gotten hold of is the UK VHS of The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze distributed by Universal Pictures (UK) Ltd.  The only trailer attached to this release is for the 20th anniversary "update" of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that came out in 2002.  Basically, this was Spielberg's attempt to give his iconic sci-fi the treatment that Lucas did with the 20th anniversary Special Edition of Star Wars, with added scenes and digitally enhanced effects, only he struggled to kick up even a fraction of the interest.  The only thing that anyone seemed to notice or comment on was that the bike sequence had been modified to replace the cops' guns with walkie-talkies, which earned Spielberg enough derision for a lampooning on South Park, but nothing near the amount of heated fervor as having Greedo shoot first.  My understanding is that Spielberg has denounced this version and now tells people to stick with the original.  Good to know that he's not as fanatical as Lucas.

The Big Freeze opens with a narrator (John Ingle) explaining that dinosaurs walked the Earth long before humans and were a pretty diverse bunch.  Ingle's narration isn't anywhere near as annoying and intrusive as Pat Hingle's in the original film (for one, we don't hear another peep out of him until the very end), but given that we're already so far into the series, I find it a bit ominous that they apparently still feel the need to open by explaining to us what a dinosaur was.  It doesn't strike me as a good indication of how highly they estimate their viewers' intelligence.

Ducky (now voiced by Aria Curzon) is in a funk with her adopted stegosaurus brother Spike (Rob Paulsen) because his snoring is keeping her awake at night, and Cera (Anndi McAfee) advises her (in song form!) to keep nursing that grudge until things go her way.  Meanwhile, a herd of nomadic spike tails has taken up residence in the Great Valley and Spike, feeling unwanted and excluded by Ducky, grows close to a young male named Tippy (Jeremy Suarez) and his mother (Susan Krebs).  When the Valley is hit by heavy snowfall for the first time in anybody's living memory, the spike tail herd decide to move on in search of better grazing grounds and Spike is torn between whether to follow his own kind or to stay with his adopted saurolophus family.  Ducky, bitterly jealous and hurt that Spike could even consider leaving them, advises him to go, but later realises how much she misses Spike and decides to go after him and convince him to return.  When Cera, Littlefoot (Thomas Dekker) and Petrie (Jeff Bennett) get wise to what Ducky is up to, they decide to follow to ensure that no harm comes to either of their wayward friends.  Hence, we get endless footage of the gang trekking through raging blizzards which the sensible part of my brain insists would kill a cold-blooded animal in seconds.  Then I remind myself that Petrie miraculously survived a 50ft plunge whilst sandwiched between a T-Rex and a boulder in the original film, and suddenly I'm less inclined to be picky with the sequel over "realism".

From the outset, you'd be forgiven for assuming that this was going to be a story focusing on the relationship between Ducky and Spike, and on Spike wanting to understand more about his identity and heritage as a "spike tail".  As a premise I'd say that that actually has potential.  Spike was easily the most one dimensional of the group in the original - a mute, ravenous doofus and nothing more - yet his backstory is so poignant when you think about it.  He was on his own before he even hatched and he's the only one who in the end was not reunited with any of his family at the Great Valley.  Since he was taken in and raised by a family of another species (one leading a completely different lifestyle to the one he's naturally built for), there's an interesting scenario to be gleaned from Spike twigging that he's different to his siblings and feeling curious but also conflicted when he finally gets the opportunity to connect with his own kind.  The eventual outcome might be totally predictable - obviously, Spike is going to learn that his "real" family is with Ducky and the other saurolophus because what makes a "family" is determined by so much more than just genetics and physical resemblance, and you won't be terribly gobsmacked to learn that this is indeed where The Big Freeze ends up taking things - but it is one viable way I could see them expanding on the set-up from the original film.

Unfortunately, surprisingly little of The Big Freeze is actually devoted to Spike and his curiosity about other spike tails, and once he makes the decision to leave the Valley his story thread trails off and he all but disappears from the movie altogether - it is, in effect, a smokescreen to the real story, which is about Littlefoot and his relationship with Mr Thicknose (Robert Guillaume), an elderly pachyrhinosaurus who functions as a kind of schoolteacher to the children of the Valley.  Thicknose is universally respected by the adult dinosaurs due to his extensive knowledge about the world outside the Valley and is very defensive of that reputation - as such, he doesn't take kindly to anything which might be perceived as undermining his authority, and Littlefoot's inquisitive nature immediately rubs him the wrong way.  Later, Thicknose falls out of favour with the adults when he fails to warn them about the possibility of snowfall and its potentially devastating effects on their food sources, and Cera's father (Ingle again) proposes stripping him of his position as local educator.  A dejected Thicknose catches Littlefoot, Cera and Petrie attempting to sneak out of the Valley and insists on accompanying them, giving Littlefoot the opportunity to bond with his old adversary and gain some understanding of his insecurities.  It's a well-intentioned story with a sweet, thoughtful moral about the basic human (or dinosaur, as it were) need to be respected and how easy it is to get hung up on wanting others to admire you.  Problem is that it's just so arbitrarily connected to the plot about Spike; one gets the impression that the writers conceived the two narrative threads as independent stories and then pasted them together when neither proved meaty enough to sustain a full-length feature on their own.  Even then, getting it to the 75 minute mark is an uphill struggle - I'd say that each narrative has just about enough material to sustain a 22 minute TV episode without getting too dull (on the basis of this film, I actually wonder if The Land Before Time might have lent itself better to a spin-off TV series right from the start - these are, by and large, TV plots which have been stretched to their absolute limit).  Unsurprisingly, we get a lot of pointless fluff, notably a tedious, overly long sequence in which the dinosaurs bombard one another with snowballs.  Ultimately, it's a testament to just how poorly-integrated the two threads are that they don't even mesh into a common resolution.  Spike's storyline is treated as a mere afterthought, with him just wandering back to rejoin the others at the end of the film, and Ducky's mother (Tress MacNeille) proving her maternal mettle by saving his life when he randomly gets knocked into water, thus reaffirming his place among the saurolophus clan.  Essentially nothing comes of his friendship with Tippy and his mother, whom we barely get to know as characters; they were simply a plot device to motivate the gang to leave the Valley and wander around in the snow for a while.  Also, I'm not totally convinced that Spike actually did choose to be with the saurolophus so much as the decision was made for him; he happened to bump into the others while searching for food, then Ducky's mother is declared his "real family" because she was the best equipped to save him and wasn't heartless enough to let him drown.  Then again, I found the ending to be a bit glib in general - Ingle's narrator assures us that eventually the snow problem went away by itself and we never do learn how things worked out for Mr Thicknose.

Also of note is that Ducky is here a lot more tolerable than she was in the original film, whereas Petrie seems to have gotten a heck of a lot more inane.  Seriously, if any character has been royally screwed over in the transition from the original theatrical feature to the DTV sequels, it's Petrie, who's clearly been whacked pretty hard by an idiot stick since arriving at the Great Valley.  Petrie wasn't a dumb character in the original.  He was nervous, uptight and a little hung up on the fact that he wasn't able to fly, but certainly not stupid.  Here, he's so unembarrassed by his decreased IQ that he flat-out states, at one point, "Me believe you...but then me believe anything!"  Which leads me onto my second contention with DTV sequel-Petrie - in the original, Petrie had a quirky, grammatically incorrect manner of speaking (almost as if English wasn't his first language) which here has been boiled down to a very basic tendency to substitute "I" with "Me", presumably to make him sound more dense (it also gives his character more of a Jar Jar Binks vibe, as if you needed anything else about him to set your teeth on edge).  Ducky, on the other hand, retains some of her infantile speech mannerisms but is here played with a notch more restraint than when she was voiced by Judith Barsi (once again, I wish to emphasise that my dislike of Barsi's Ducky does not translate into dislike or insensitivity toward Barsi herself - what happened to her was appalling).  She's less in your face with her cutesiness, and I like her the better for it.

On the whole, The Big Freeze has no pretensions about being aimed anyone but the very smallest of children, and that will certainly be an issue for anyone who reveres the original for being a particularly dark, intense and gritty slice of 1980s animation.  Personally, I've always found Bluth's so-called edginess as a film-maker to be severely overrated (see my comments in my previous LBT review about expired milk and frosted cereal), but there's no denying that the peril in the original film felt leagues more genuine than it does here.  A T-Rex makes an appearance in this film too, but it's hard to imagine this one successfully killing one of the protagonist's parents as happened with Sharptooth in the original (he gets beaten by a giant snowball, for eff's sake). The sequels also deviate from the original by adding in a musical element (prompted, presumably, by the Disney Renaissance putting animated musicals in vogue again), and I'm aware that this tends to be a real sticking point for Bluth devotees.  The Big Freeze has three - an ode to the virtues of being angry, performed by Cera, a melancholic song about family performed by Ducky's mother and the main cast and a song by Mr Thicknose which sums up the moral of his arc.  I'd describe them all as harmless fluff - they're decidedly kid-orientated and utterly disposable, but at the very least I find them more tolerable than the musical numbers from any of Bluth's 1990s output that isn't Anastasia (try Youtubing some of the songs from The Pebble and The Penguin.  Just kidding - don't).  Incidentally, I've read at least one review of The Big Freeze suggesting that Cera's song might give children the wrong message, since it's all about savouring your anger, throwing tantrums and bearing grudges until you get what you what want, ie: a message discounted by the movie's overall moral, but then very young children are less likely to pay attention to such things and more likely to just rewind and watch the songs over and over.  In fairness, though, it's probably no worse than The Lion King's "Hakuna Matata" in that regard.
 
In the end I walk away more or less indifferent to The Big Freeze.  It doesn't inspire anything close to the searing contempt that I have for DTV Disney sequels like The Lion King II: Simba's Pride and The Little Mermaid II: Return To The Sea, presumably because I don't regard the original as being anything too magnificent in the first place, but I was pretty hard-pressed to keep my eyes open throughout.  If you're an admirer of Bluth and consider him to be one the great misunderstood geniuses of American animation, then it's a safe bet that you'll loathe and resent this film with every fibre of your being, and I do not recommend you even giving it a second thought.  Myself, it neither pleasantly surprised me nor satisfied my immense gluttony for punishment.  The Big Freeze is quite content in being undemanding fluff for the under-5s and all in all it won't do much harm to them.  On the other hand, it's such a lacklustre and slow-moving film that I'm not convinced that even the tots are going to have an infinite amount of patience for it.  My morbid curiosity in checking out a few more entries in the LBT series hasn't waned, although I sincerely hope that, for better or for worse, The Big Freeze doesn't represent it at the peak of its liveliness.

A Day or a Lifetime: Mulholland Drive's Mysterious Blue Box

Last time, I likened our journey through the squalid plumbing of the Hotel Earle to the opening sequence of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, in which we pan down beneath the grasses of suburban Lumberton to reveal the bug infestation that runs rife throughout those seemingly immaculate lawns.  In both cases, we become attuned to the forces of darkness which are operating right beneath the characters' noses, although in Barton Fink's case these are concealed more by the tedium and decrepitude of a hotel that's so overwhelmingly mundane that this in itself becomes unsettling.  Our glimpse into the hidden abyss of the Earle essentially confirms our uneasy suspicions that there are screwier forces at work in this hotel, the real shock being reserved for what happens immediately after when Barton swats the mosquito on Audrey's body.  If there's a moment from Lynch's filmography that this truly begs comparison to, it's the scene from Mulholland Drive (2001) in which we get to peak inside the mysterious blue box which appears out of nowhere at the Club Silencio.  In both we see a fascination with a beckoning oblivion; these are films gazing directly into darkness and coming out very different, decidedly more warped creatures as a result.

Mulholland Drive has a number of parallels with Barton Fink, not least a mutual interest in the tensions between Hollywood's glamorous image and the dark underbelly of cruelty, failure and corruption that lurks not far beneath.  Both films follow a hopeful young newcomer to Hollywood (Naomi Watts' aspiring actress Betty/Diane and our good friend Barton the screenwriter) whom we sense right from the start is doomed to have their spirit crushed by an unsparing system.  We see echoes in Betty/Diane's troubled relationship with amnesic femme fatale Rita/Camilla (Laura Elena Harring) of the same jealousy and betrayal that ultimately sours relations between Barton and Charlie.  Finally, the two films each contain a pivotal scene in which we, the viewer, find ourselves drawn into a mysterious abyss which seems to dramatically rewrite everything we thought we knew about the characters' situation.  Betty and Rita uncover a small blue box which they realise can be opened by a key they had squirreled away earlier in the film, and which may yield answers to the question of Rita's true identity.  As Rita prepares to unlock the box, Betty mysteriously vanishes into thin air.  Unnerved, Rita calls to her and gets no response, but is not dissuaded from the task at hand.  The box is unlocked and opened, and Rita finds...nothing.  This is Lynch's great punchline. The box contains nothing and yet that nothingness has a destructive potency all of its own, pulling in and obliterating all who gaze upon it.  We emerge, but Rita is gone.  More hauntingly, we find ourselves back in the presence of Betty's Aunt Ruth (Maya Bond), who left the apartment at the beginning of the narrative and now returns to find it vacant.  She scans the room, attempting to locate the source of the disturbance, but seeing nothing she turns away.  Rita and Betty now cease to exist; they have become part of the nothingness unleashed from the small blue box and, in a particularly cruel twist, it seems that their long and intricate narrative, too, has been completely undone.  Ruth appears exactly as she did at the start of the film, raising questions as to whether she ever left at all.  This is a Lynchian joke that's very much on the viewer, and it seems only fitting that an event so chillingly apocalyptic, in the context of the film, should be played as little more than a minor interruption from the perspective of a character who barely notices anything at all.  In effect, Ruth's mildly bemused reaction is the real punchline, not just to the box opening scene, but to the Betty/Rita arc of Mulholland Drive as a whole.

There's an obvious allusion here to Pandora's box, with Rita's lethal curiosity dooming both herself and Betty, much as Barton's sexual curiosity toward Audrey awakens the beasts lurking deep within the Earle.  The opening of the blue box is truly an apocalyptic event, for it results in a dramatic rearranging of the universe, setting its characters on a catastrophic course where the only possible outcome is to violently crash and burn.  Betty and Rita reappear, but have been recast in vastly different roles.  Betty is now the self-loathing failed actress Diane, while Rita is the seductive and manipulative Camilla, who's had more luck than Diane on the acting front, thanks in part to her ability to sleep her way into a few choice roles.  The blue box reappears toward the end of the film, only on this particular go-around we learn that it actually houses two ungodly demons (in the form of a couple of elderly sadists) who crawl out and beleaguer Diane to the absolute breaking point.  By comparison, the rearranging of the universe in Barton Fink is more subdued; when Barton awakens, he retains his identity as Barton the screenwriter, but finds himself trapped in a nightmare scenario where his reality is rapidly unraveling and his own role as the hero, villain or waif of his story is called into question.  In both cases, our descent into cataclysm is characterised by the cold, hypnotic embrace of the abyss, be it the ominous vacuum of the mystery box or the slimy, infected guts of the Hotel Earle - not only are character and viewer alike sucked in and consumed by it (perhaps literally, in Rita's case), but there is a definite sense of the film itself disappearing down a dark hole as a result of its characters' actions, of a wrong and dangerous turn having been taken from which there can be no redemption or return.  The camera never does find its way out of the meandering pipes of the Earle; instead, it dissolves into Barton's fresh waking nightmare.  It is a place, we suspect, where one goes to get permanently lost.  The feverish intensity that rages deep in the bowels of the Earle comes to dominate the remainder of Barton's story, much as the petrifying blackness of the vacant box infuses Diane's story and sees it through to its sorry conclusion.

Like Barton Fink, Mulholland Drive will forever be subject to the speculation that at least part of it is a mere dream/wish fulfillment fantasy on the part of its young Hollywood hopeful (ie: Diane is "real" and Betty is merely the person she wishes she could be), although personally I've never gotten along with that theory (read: I despise it with the intensity of the heat of a thousand suns) and would be disappointed should Lynch ever come out and confirm it (thankfully, I know he never will).  For me, few things could spoil the effect of that wry, eerily muted apocalypse that takes place on an unsuspecting Aunt Ruth's carpet than the revelation that it was all cortisol-induced.

A Day or a Lifetime: The Audrey Whodunnit

One of the greatest sleights of hand in Barton Fink is how, sixty-five minutes into the film, it takes a startling turn and goes from being a subdued, claustrophobic comedy-drama about an aspiring screenwriter's grappling with writer's block to a full-blown and particularly gruesome whodunnit. Having invited Audrey into the Earle and allowed her to seduce him, Barton awakes the following morning to find her still at his side and, in an ostensible double victory, finally does away with the pesky mosquito who's been depriving him of sleep ever since he arrived in Hollywood. Then he notices that Audrey is dripping with blood and turns her over to discover that she has been messily butchered during the night. Oh shit indeed.

One of the film's more subtle tricks is that it doesn't actually give a clear answer to the whodunnit by the time the end-credits start rolling, although it does deceive us into thinking that it has. Likely, we'll take it as a given that Charlie somehow managed to off Audrey while Barton was sleeping, because we're told that Charlie leads a double life as serial killer Karl Mundt. He is implied to be responsible for a number of off-screen atrocities, including the death of Mayhew and, more hazily, Barton's own family, and if nothing else the audience gets a first-hand glimpse of his homicidal fury during the final showdown with Mastronatti and Deutsch. The bathroom sink shot, in which the camera plunges down into the grungy, sordid depths of the Hotel Earle piping while Barton and Audrey are making love in the adjacent room, would appear to link Charlie to the outcome, for his tortured cries become all the more audible the deeper we descend; it is as if he is reacting in anger and revulsion and Barton awakens to find the consequences the following morning. We even have a plausible motive - jealousy - when we take into account just how eagerly Charlie seems to vie for Barton's attention. I noted in my previous entry that the Earle and its many facets - Charlie, the wallpaper, the mosquito - seem to be locked in an eternal battle with the manifestations of feminine beauty - Audrey, the picture of the beach beauty - which offer Barton release from the barren confinement of the Earle. Charlie has his sights set on becoming Barton's muse, but not only does Barton turn to Audrey instead in his hour of need, he commits the ultimate taboo of inviting Audrey into the Earle so that they can have sexual relations right on Charlie's territory. It's hardly surprising that this should bring out the very worst in Charlie.

All the same, one of the recurring themes of Barton Fink has to do with the deceptive nature of outer appearance and the repeated intimation that we should not trust the superficial guises that the world at large would greatly like for us to swallow. The vast majority of the film's supporting cast are ultimately revealed to be fakers in some way. Charlie presents himself as a jovial, down-to-earth insurance salesman, but is revealed to have to an immensely sinister side. Mayhew is a literary heavyweight who's actually a drunken fraud, propped up by his long-suffering "secretary" Audrey. Lipnick insists that he likes Barton and wants that "Barton Fink feeling" for Capitol Pictures, but his use of the phrase loses all meaning as the film goes on. Truth in Barton Fink is a far more ugly, messy and sordid thing than most prefer to contemplate, so on that note should we necessarily trust our own assumption that Charlie killed Audrey based on what we subsequently learn about his character? Is it too facile a solution to the mystery, what with the lack of any really conclusive evidence to link him to Audrey's death beyond the reveal that he apparently has a habit of butchering people? At most, this accounts for why he's so proficient when it comes to disposing of Audrey's body, but it does not itself provide proof that Audrey died at Charlie's hands, nor address the improbable manner in which Charlie would have had to have pulled off the crime (how probable is it that Charlie could have entered Barton's room and killed Audrey without Barton noticing?  Did he literally send his vengeful wrath up through the pipes?).

In the end, we cannot be certain that Charlie actually did kill Audrey, although it's a safe bet that he's not as innocent to what's gone on as he infers - earlier, he stated that he "hears everything that goes on in this dump" and the retching noises that accompany our journey down the bathroom pipes would suggest that he means this all-too literally. There are times when Charlie and the Earle appear to be one and the same and his character is given a kind of omnipresence which lingers long after Charlie has left Room 621, all of which indicates that his shock and revulsion upon being greeted with the murder scene are feigned. We know that Charlie is not to be trusted, but then who in this film truly is?

Supposing that Charlie is not Audrey's killer, are there any other plausible suspects? Hotel employees Chet and Pete seem too incidental as characters to be taken seriously as culprits, and we are not given evidence that there is anyone else in the hotel other than a couple making love in the room next to Barton's. The only other viable candidate would appear to be Barton himself (his lack of knowledge of the incident notwithstanding), which is a far more disturbing proposition than the suggestion that Audrey died at the hands of an accomplished killer like Charlie. Of all the figures in the film, the viewer is prompted to believe that they can at least trust Barton - while not blinded to the fact that he is a fool and a hypocrite, the viewer experiences Hollywood and the Earle through his eyes, remaining at all times as uncomfortably in the dark as he is. Barton is the viewer's ally in their mutual discombobulation; the notion that he could have done something so shocking and unpalatable behind the viewer's back is a troubling one. We're inclined to go along with Barton when he professes his innocence to Charlie, but should we?

In my previous entry, I dismissed a theory proposing that everything that happens from Barton's first night in the Earle onward is a dream on the grounds that "that's when weird things start to happen". The entire film, I argued, could be described as "weird", and no such distinction exists between the nature of the of weirdness that Barton initially experiences upon arrival at the Earle and what happens immediately after. I did, however, suggest that this theory might have a bit more weight if applied to the point where Barton wakes up to find Audrey murdered, because it's here that the film kicks into a completely different gear. Strangeness pervades every corner of Barton Fink, but it's from this point onward that the film starts to become strange in more extraordinary ways - whereas its sense of menace previously came from an eerie emphasis upon the mundane (mosquitos, noisy neighbours, peeling wallpaper), it now comes increasingly from far-out twists like waking up to find that your lover has been murdered or the revelation that your neighbour is a serial killer. Reality, of course, can be every bit as twisted and far-out, but here it definitely feels as if the film is taking a self-conscious wander into the territory of more sensationalist fiction. If we view the Earle as a representation of Barton's own inner mind then we might see Audrey's death as something that happens entirely for the purposes of changing the rules of the game. Audrey is sacrificed in order to give Barton - and Barton Fink - a release from the stifling monotony of his writer's block, one that grants him the forward momentum he needs to knuckle down and finish his screenplay. We get no clear answer to the whodunnit because one does not actually exist - Barton simply wakes up to find Audrey dead. The exact cause of her death is irrelevant.  Having finally achieved sexual intimacy with the woman whose quiet, unassuming charm has been tantalising Barton eve since he first locked eyes on her, he drags her down into the darkest, most perverse depths of his psyche, whereupon she is ripped to shreds. The viewer is left to ponder not merely the horror of Barton's situation, but also the casual cruelty with which Audrey, by far the most compassionate figure encountered by Barton throughout his adventures in Hollywood, is reduced from character to prop in the blink of an eye.

We may recall that earlier on, during his second meeting with Charlie, Barton had summarised the duties of a writer as having to "plumb the depths" in order to "dredge up something from inside." This is Barton at his most hopelessly naive, oblivious not only to how well-acquainted his companion truly is with dredging up the gruesome inner details of the human condition, but also to the darker forces he unconsciously implies are lurking deep within his own soul. It's tempting to dismiss Barton's words as the empty pretensions of a would-be artist anxious to conceal the fact that he has no hidden depths to speak of, but the bleaker reality is that Barton is an unfledged dolt who knows little of the world, not least the chaotic impulses that lie in wait at the back of his skull, and his journey from Audrey's death onward is one of frightening self-discovery (albeit one which ultimately leaves Barton stranded in yet another limbo). The shot linking the love-making scene with the gruesome morning after discovery - our excursion through the dank, dark waterworks of the Earle - seems to deliberately evoke Barton's comments on plumbing the depths of the life of the mind and exploring the unpleasantness that lies within. We find ourselves swallowed deep by a hidden underworld of sickness and squalor, where the sounds of Barton and Audrey are slowly drowned out by the sounds of Charlie in a vomiting rage; this is the ugly, feverish anguish that runs all through the innards Earle and manifests on the surface as an abnormal stickiness leaking from the walls. Like the black bugs infesting the suburban grasses of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), this alerts us to the darker undercurrents at work in the Earle, which up until now have largely stayed hidden out of view; it also serves as a passageway from one part of Barton's brain to the next, slipping away from an awakening erotic fantasy and resurfacing in a nightmare scenario where Barton comes face to face with Audrey's desecrated corpse. Barton cannot account for what has happened; he has been caught off-guard by the cruelty and depravity of his own creative mind, which has moved to sacrifice Audrey on artistic whim and now proceeds to mock him with the consequences.

The most accurate answer to the film's whodunnit would be to say that Audrey was murdered by the Earle; that is to say, the same malevolent forces that caused the wallpaper to peel and brought a distinctly out-of-place mosquito into being. The question this immediately raises, of course, is who ultimately pulls the strings at the Earle - Barton, whose inner mind the Earle embodies, or Charlie, who appears to actually be a part of the Earle? If we view the Earle as a representation of Barton's inner head, then what are we to make of Charlie's accusation, toward the end of the film, that Barton is but a tourist with a typewriter and not naturally at home inside what is supposedly his own psyche? Is the cruelest twist of all that Barton should be rejected by his own inner mind, which dismisses him as merely a front, a constructed self belied by the chaotic demons that rage underneath? If Charlie resides in the murky depths of Barton's brain, then the implication would follow that he too is another facet of Barton's psyche, yet he appears to have a mind and will all of his own, and to be toying with Barton in a manner that seems by turns adoring and merciless.

Charlie too gets what he wants out of Audrey's death. He gets to be Barton's confidant and rescuer in his new hour of need, disposing of incriminating evidence and experiencing the satisfaction of having Barton weep feebly that Charlie is the only friend in Hollywood upon whom he can truly rely. Above all, he gets to impart words of inspiration that once again come back to the idea that Charlie wishes to be embraced and remolded by Barton - the suggestion that Barton "think about me...make me your wrestler." Charlie may be a raging inner demon, but above all what he yearns for is a companion with whom he can drink whiskey and swap anecdotes about the capriciousness of life, and to whom he can be extremely useful. He is, in effect, a terrible fiend who aspires to be the ultimate friend.

A Day or a Lifetime: Awake for the first time in years?

Back when I first started blogging about Barton Fink (only the second string of entries I started writing on The Spirochaete Trail, after rating the gruesome deaths of cute cartoon forest creatures), I stated that the very first analysis I ever read of the film came from the "Pocket Essentials" guide to the Coens by Ellen Cheshire and John Ashbrook.  I also indicated that I don't think so much of the book or their analysis now, which definitely falls on the facile side.  By that, I mean that they identify several the key themes and motifs without delving particularly deeply into what these might mean (eg: there are a number of obvious Hell allusions during the scenes at the Hotel Earle, so Cheshire and Ashbrook are happy to accept that Barton literally goes into Hell every time he sets foot in the Earle, and that Charlie is literally either The Devil or a fallen angel).  Truthfully though, it seems a bit churlish to go after a slim, easy read like a Pocket Essentials book (one which devotes a meagre eleven pages to the film in question) for not being in-depth enough.  No, by far my biggest issue with the book would be their shoddy researching (or lack of) on the death of Takako Konishi, a Japanese office worker who in 2001 was falsely reported by several media outlets to have traveled to Minnesota in search of the money buried by Steve Buscemi's character in the Coens' 1996 film Fargo, apparently unaware that the film was a fiction, only to die of exposure in the effort.  This was subsequently debunked and Konishi's death was determined to have been a suicide, but Cheshire and Ashbrook do not appear to have looked this up, and these days I practice a personal rule about immediately throwing out books on the Coens that lazily perpetuate the old Konishi myth.  Their extremely lightweight reading of Barton Fink will not satisfy the hardcore obsessive who delights in picking over every last detail of the film, but it's fine enough as a starting point or for somebody who just wants to get to grips with some of the basic symbolism.

At the end of their analysis, Cheshire and Ashbrook propose that there are three possible interpretations of Barton Fink, which they term The Brazil Theory, The Videodrome Theory, and Apocalypse Now/The Buffy The Vampire Slayer Theory (they act as if these are all familiar and well-established theories among the Coen brothers fandom, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they pulled them all, names included, out of their arses on the spot).  Respectively, these mean that a) Barton is crazy, b) Barton is dreaming and c) Barton's world is really just that weird.  All frustratingly generic theories that basically hand-wave rather than tackle the film's feverish madness, but what interests me about the second theory is their rationale that we cannot trust anything that happens from very early on in the film because of a simple visual cheat on the part of the Coens - in Cheshire and Ashbrook's words "you see Barton drop off to sleep when he arrives at Hotel Earle, but you don't see him wake up, and from then on weird things start to happen."  Straight off the bat, it's a theory that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, because it would indicate that Barton's initial encounter with Chet and his early glimpses of life in the Earle are part of the non-dream portion of the film, yet they definitely qualify as every bit as "weird" as much of what we see thereafter.  Secondly, it's not actually the case that we see Barton drop off to sleep during his first night at the Earle - rather, we see him attempting to sleep only to be kept awake by the intrusive whines of the mosquito.

Nevertheless, I got to thinking about the various points in Barton Fink where we see Barton either settling down to sleep or awakening from sleep and what we might take from this.  After all, there can be little doubt that dreaming is an important theme in Barton Fink, as hinted right from the opening sequence when we hear the hero of Barton's play proclaim that he is awake for the first time in years, having been accused by his companions of living in a perpetual fantasy.  The film repeatedly prompts us to question where we are to draw the line between the objective and subjective.

The list of scenes is as follows:

• When Barton arrives at the Earle, he attempts to retire to sleep for the night but is disturbed by the mosquito.
• After the disastrous picnic with Audrey and Mayhew, Barton is seen sleeping at the Earle but is once again snapped back into alertness by the mosquito.  Unlike the aforementioned scene, Barton is lying on top of the bed in his regular clothing and the light in his room is on, hinting that he took a brief nap while working on his screenplay.
• Barton is lying with his face buried under his pillow before Audrey arrives.
• Barton awakens after his night with Audrey.
• Barton passes out while watching Charlie do his little clean-up.
• Barton is restored to consciousness by Charlie physically slapping him.

Early on, there appears to be a pattern with Barton attempting to fall or remain asleep but not succeeding.  Barton's problem is not that he's a dreamer, but rather that he cannot dream and is forced to wander through life with his eyes wide open (which is not to say that he actually sees a great deal).  He cannot physically settle himself, nor can he latch onto any fleeting traces of escapism that come his way.  His lack of focus and inability to step out from the barren walls of his own socially-stunted mind are what make getting his screenplay written such a formidable task.  Up until the dramatic twist that occurs midway, the film is characterised by an absence of dreaming, a sort of frenzied insomnia that pervades every moment of his time inside the Earle and outside in diurnal Hollywood.  There is a strong sense of unease throughout, but for the first half this never tips into the overtly nightmarish, this menace being rooted in mundane, everyday disturbances whose intrusions seem magnified by the great empty spaces they have to fill.  Barton's life is horrifyingly dull, and that dullness, much like his mosquito nemesis, is threatening to drain him of all vitality.

Where Barton does find glimpses of potential liberation are in his brushes with femininity - the magnetism of the mysterious and compassionate Audrey and his fascination with the kitschy image of the beach-dwelling beauty that hangs above his desk.  Both provide Barton with momentary solace, yet both are also at odds with the machinations of the Earle, which repeatedly strikes out and pulls Barton back into his stifling situation should he happen to glance their way for too long.  The picture, chintzy as it is, moves Barton and offers to lift him up and carry him beyond the walls of the Earle, into an escapist fantasy accompanied by sounds of crashing waves and shrieking gulls.  Barton can only get so far into this diversion, however, before the Earle hits back and once again commands his attention, with its peeling wallpapers and bloodsucking fauna.  This foreshadows the unspoken rivalry which later develops between Barton's two confidants.  Charlie, who is for all intents and purposes the human manifestation of the Earle's dark and imposing nature, professes a desire to be Barton's muse, and it seems that Barton is even considering taking him up on his offer when he ponders the question (originally posed by Lipnick) of "Orphan" or "Dame" right before inviting Audrey into the Earle.  Earlier, Charlie had mentioned that his parents have both passed on, making him the orphan that Barton considers turning to but ultimately passes over in favour of the dame Audrey.  Ironically, Audrey too arouses Barton from his bed when she shows up at the Earle, although lying there with his head buried under the pillow Barton does not appear to be attempting to sleep so much as hiding from an all-consuming void which is dangerously close to getting the best of him.

Through his successful seduction of Audrey (or vice versa), Barton ostensibly appears to have beaten the Earle, for he not only gets to satisfy his long-frustrated sexual and escapist urges, but he also gets to sleep and, although the mosquito once again proves a disruption, Barton finally appears to defeat the mosquito by swatting it as it perches itself upon Audrey's body.  It becomes apparent, however, that the mosquito, in offering itself up for sacrifice, has played a final trick on Barton, beckoning him to strike Audrey and uncover the most horrific disturbance imaginable.  The Earle is very much on top of the situation.

It's at this dramatic midway twist that the film finally steps into the territory of a full-blown nightmare, raising the question as to whether Barton really is now asleep and dreaming.  This is a fairly improbable turn of events, a sledgehammer shock which goes far beyond the subdued peculiarities of the initial half.  I'd say that Cheshire/Ashbrook's "Videodrome" theory might have more credibility here than at the start of the film as they propose, as the film itself seems to radically change direction at this point.  At the same time, the screaming, hysterical Barton has never appeared more animated and alive.  When Barton does attempt to remove himself, by passing out, it is one of the facets of the Earle, Charlie, that aggressively restores him to the present.  Barton has not escaped the Earle, which continues to have a tight hold on him, but it now seems to be playing a very different game to the one before, in which the muted discomfort of Barton's earlier predicament are replaced by far more sensational twists and revelations, and from which Barton actually rediscovers his ability to write.  It is as if the Earle has allowed Barton to escape down one hole in its dark and squalid piping, only to surface and wake up in a different reality altogether.  This is what has happened, more or less, and from here on in Barton Fink becomes less a film about the turmoils of writer's block than the monstrosities of the mind untethered.

VHS Verve: The Land Before Time (aka: Some of Our Dinosaurs are Missing)

There's a confession I figured I was going to have to make sooner or later, albeit with great trepidation as it's already cost me quite a few friends in the animation buff circuit, so here goes: I honestly don't think that much of Don Bluth (that's the polite way of putting it - when I'm in one of my meaner moods I'm inclined to dismiss him as a talentless hack).  I'm well aware that there are people out there who revere Bluth as some kind of animation god for having the cajones to break away from Disney during a time when that company looked to have hit the skids and (they argue) taking the animation industry to lofty new heights of adult-orientated splendor that put even Walt's masterworks in the shade - but I can't help but think that such people are either smoking something or just really, REALLY have it in for Disney.  I have no objection to people liking Bluth, but I'll never for the life of me see eye-to-eye with those who regard his films as being either fearlessly anti-Disney or deeper, darker and more adult-orientated than Disney in every way.  I do think it's fair to say that Bluth's films tend to be murkier and uglier-looking than any of Disney's films (except for The Black Cauldron, perhaps), but they also have this twee, cloying quality which makes sitting through them not unlike eating a bowl of frosted cereal drowned in a pool of expired milk.  Bluth's films, far more than anything in Disney's annals, always come off as deeply confused as to which direction they're pulling in, and that's why the end-results tend to be, in my eyes, such shapeless, incoherent messes.  If you're after animation that's dark, mature and seriously un-Disney, then surely your first port of call should be films birthed from an entirely different side of the industry that were in no way trying to replicate the Disney style, eg: When The Wind Blows or The Plague Dogs.  Not the output of an ex-Disney animator who had consciously appointed himself with the task of keeping Walt's waning spirit alive.

Some who champion Bluth will make the distinction between his 1980s output and the inexplicably inane, sugar-addled nightmares that became his trademark in the 1990s, at least pre-Anastasia (although I swear that there's been some serious revisionism in lumping All Dogs Go To Heaven with Bluth's better brainchildren - there was a time when opinion seemed unanimous that THAT film was when it all really started to go to shit for Bluth, and not Rock a Doodle, which was merely the second hard bump on the way down).  Others argue that Bluth had an early stroke of brilliance with The Secret of NIMH and then got whacked pretty hard by the law of diminishing returns right after.  I'll concede that I probably would have liked NIMH a lot more if I hadn't come to it already such a diehard fan of the novel it was based on - I'd read it three times as a kid before I ever had the chance to see the film, and I was absolutely devastated by what I saw as an atrociously misguided reworking of Robert C. O'Brien's original story and themes.  I will credit Bluth for helping to keep the animated feature afloat at a time when Disney's commitment to the form seemed in question, and for providing Disney with more of an incentive to up their game, although for the most part I wouldn't say that time has been especially kind to those early works - today, it's obvious to me that Disney's The Great Mouse Detective holds up as a stronger film than its one-time rival An American Tail.  Having Vincent Price in your ranks will certainly take you a long way.

And yet, there is one field in which Bluth has somehow endured as the undefeated leader of the pack, albeit with a fairly unremarkable contender - the cartoon dinosaur movie.  Against all odds, Bluth's The Land Before Time, made during his partnership with Amblin Entertainment, still stands head and shoulders above subsequent challengers, including Disney's own Dinosaur and Pixar's recent disasterpiece The Good Dinosaur (I'm not even going to go into that Walking With Dinosaurs entry).  People still refer to it as the benchmark of animated dino flicks, which I suspect says more about how thoroughly those aforementioned films dropped the ball than it does the robustness of Bluth's picture.  I don't know what it is about cartoon dinosaurs and why it's seemingly so hard to produce a semi-decent flick about them.  Oh wait, there's also the "Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia.  Okay, so let's narrow that down to films specifically about talking cartoon dinosaurs.  It doesn't help that The Land Before Time, Dinosaur and The Good Dinosaur all feel like vague variations on what is essentially the exact same plot - namely, young dinosaur gets separated from family and must brave the tumultuous wilderness in search of The Promised Land (or, in the case of The Good Dinosaur, the homely farm, to be reunited with his rather unpleasant family and their galline livestock, which, being self-sufficient herbivores, said family can't possibly have any use for).

What The Land Before Time and The Good Dinosaur also have in common is that they both endured torturous productions, although in the former's case this mostly seemed to happen at the post-production stage, where Bluth was reportedly forced to remove over ten minutes' worth of fully-animated footage at the insistence of executive producers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who feared that the film was in danger of getting a PG rating.  Nowadays, animated films with PG ratings are commonplace (see Moana, Zootopia, etc), but back in the late 1980s the industry took a very different view, particularly in light of the recent box office failure of Disney's The Black Cauldron, whose misfortunes were widely attributed to its PG rating scaring a lot of the family crowd away.  As a result of all the heavy editing it underwent, the final cut of The Land Before Time wound up clocking in at a paltry 69 minutes, so wily tricks had to be implemented during its theatrical run to ensure that patrons didn't feel they were being sold short - namely, they stuck our old friend Family Dog at the front to pad things out.  Bluth wasn't wild about all this tampering, but then The Land Before Time was very much Spielberg's baby, not his, and he had little control over the final product.  Bluth fans may cite this all as proof that the man was a misunderstood genius whose dark and ambitious visions were compromised by a pair of Hollywood hacks, but given that Bluth's next move, upon casting off the shackles of Amblin Entertainment and securing his own independent funding, was to make All Dogs Go To Heaven, I frankly feel that he needed the guidance of a higher authority to reign him in.  The Land Before Time may be an imperfect film, but it never quite slips into the all-out narrative messiness of Dogs.

The Land Before Time was released to US cinemas on 18th November 1988, and Bluth's rivalry with his former colleagues at Disney once again reared its head as it found itself in direct competition with Oliver and Company, an updated reworking of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, which ironically featured Bluth's usual sidekick Dom DeLuise in the role of Fagin.  Tensions were high to see if the recent box office triumph of An American Tail over The Great Mouse Detective had been a fluke, or if there was indeed a new king of animated features in town.  The Land Before Time/Oliver rivalry didn't produce any clear answers, with Oliver beating Land at the US box office by only a narrow margin, an outcome that must have encouraged Disney while not causing Bluth to lose too much sweat.  The following year, when Bluth released All Dogs Go To Heaven, Disney's contender was The Little Mermaid, and that was it.  Bluth's career was far from over, but his days of being a conceivable threat to Disney were done.

Credit for inspiring this entry goes to The Spoilist, who recently commented that The Land Before Time doesn't hold up to adult scrutiny, in part because it's all-too obvious there are pieces missing.  I felt compelled to dig out my old VHS tape and give my run-down on the film's various strengths and weaknesses, with an eye toward assessing the blatancy of the numerous edits and how they impact on the film as a whole.  If you're a Bluth devotee and fear that I'm going to be terribly hard on The Land Before Time, I'd like to point out that this is actually the one Bluth film which genuinely brings out strong feelings of nostalgia in me.  I didn't see the film during its original theatrical run, but I vividly recall those hand puppets they were giving away at Pizza Hut at the time - my cousins had a spare Littlefoot and Cera which they gave to me (as a small kid, I had a terror of pizza and certainly wouldn't have eaten there myself), and I remember being oddly fascinated by the bizarre odors exuding from the innards of those puppets.  Later on, we got the VHS too, but it's the puppets I mainly went for.  However much mincemeat I'm inclined to make of the feature itself, my memories of those puppets, and the strange sensations you got when you pressed your face into their hollowed-out back-ends, will forever conjure up feelings of instant childhood warmth for me.

The Land Before Time was released on VHS in the UK by Cinema International Corporation Video.  Here's their logo:

The Land Before Time follows the adventures of Littlefoot, a young brontosaurus/apatosaurus/whatever-the-hell-is-the-correct-term-now, who's voiced by Gabriel Damon (at first I couldn't figure out why that name sounded so oddly familiar to me, but then I realised that he also voiced our good pal Felix The Boy in The Jackie Bison Show).  Littlefoot has the misfortune of being born at a time when severe drought has destroyed much of the land's vegetation and his heavily depleted herd are having to undergo a perilous journey to reach a rumoured land of plenty known as The Great Valley.  After his mother (Helen Shaver) dies fending off a fearsome T-Rex named Sharptooth, Littlefoot is separated from the rest of his family in an earthquake and forced to continue the journey sans adult protection or guidance; along the way, he becomes leader to his own ragtag herd of lost and orphaned youngsters of assorted species, who realise that their best chance of survival is to come together and overstep the strict law of segregation that has dominated dinosaur culture for so long.  The Land Before Time appears to be making a vague point about racism and overcoming social boundaries, with Littlefoot's initial sincerity in wanting to befriend Cera (Candy Hutson), a rambunctious young triceratops whose family are traveling close by, contrasting with the hard-nosed hostility he comes up against from the adults, implying that such rules are enforced more by social conditioning than any inborn desire on the part of the individual dinosaurs.  When Littlefoot presses his mother for an answer as to why the various dinosaur species are forbidden to mingle, she doesn't have one, beyond the entirely perfunctory "that's just the way things are", which doesn't satisfy the inquisitive young apatosaurus.  Interestingly, Littlefoot's own self-identity as a "long neck" isn't cemented until he's been singled out as different by an adult "three horn" - before he's made to taste the extent of the dinosaur segregation, he has no use whatsoever for labels based on superficial physical differences.

(That being said, if the different dinosaurs species are supposed to purposely shun one another then I am confused by the sequence where Littlefoot hatches and there are a whole bunch of pint-sized dinosaurs gathered around and eager for a nosey at him.  If these dinosaurs aren't friendly with Littlefoot's herd then why do they show such interest in him and why on earth does Littlefoot's mother tolerate these total strangers getting so close to her last surviving baby?  I presume it's all a means of illustrating how tiny and timid the newborn dinosaur is without placing him in any actual danger, but it makes no sense within the context of the story.)

The Land Before Time does not boast a particularly strong or well-constructed story.  Watching it now, I'm struck by just how clunky so much of the dialogue is - for example, there's a scene where Littlefoot's mother casually remarks that there's still a long way to go before they reach The Great Valley, then proceeds to list off a string of weirdly specific directions for seemingly no other reason than to give Littlefoot a point of reference for later on in the film when he's forced to travel by himself.  Even more problematic is Pat Hingle's narration, which proves useful enough during the establishing scenes but becomes downright intrusive as things go on, and the film grows increasingly reliant on him as crutch for imparting huge chunks of information we'd be better off actually seeing play out in the context of the story.  "Show, don't tell" is not a principle that The Land Before Time especially adheres to, but then I'm going to hazard a guess that Hingle's role was significantly upped to cover for the fact that so much of the original story was left on the cutting room floor.  What does bolster the film considerably is James Horner's score, which has a magnificent, stirring quality that far transcends the gracelessness of the script.  Wherever the film succeeds in whipping up any genuine kind of emotional resonance, it's usually Horner's doing.

One plot point from The Land Before Time that I suspect would have seemed fairly edgy back in 1988 was the death of Littlefoot's mother.  It hardly took the film in any directions which Disney hadn't already trodden before - they, after all, were responsible for the most notorious cinematic death of all time with Bambi's mother - but for the specific ilk of film that Disney was making at the time, the death of a sympathetic character of that magnitude was practically unheard of.  It wasn't too ago that Disney had backed out of killing Chief in The Fox and The Hound (1981), at the expense of story development that very much hinged on the old dog not surviving (yes, Tod's mother is still killed offscreen in the same movie, but she's barely a character).  It took until The Lion King (1994) for Disney to rediscover their nerve and bump off a character they had encouraged their audience to feel emotionally invested in, so I can understand why, in the meantime, viewers would have been inclined to credit Bluth with trying to revive a lost art. And, make no mistake, it is a powerful plot point.  What sets the death of Littlefoot's mother apart from Disney's two most infamous parental deaths is that, immediately after it occurs, the story is essentially put on hold to focus extensively on Littlefoot's grief.  There's a drawn-out sequence of scenes where Littlefoot is shown first having to deal with his pain and confusion over his mother before he's able to move on with his journey.  This absolutely wouldn't have worked for Bambi (a lot of what makes that death is so haunting is the understated simplicity with which it's played), but it's nevertheless fascinating to see an animated film so heavily concerned with a character's raw, unabashed sadness.  On refection, I decided to slap the "Children's Lessons In Mortality" tag on this review, as I realised that Littlefoot does indeed exhibit all five stages of grieving throughout this sequence - we see Denial when he initially struggles to comprehend what has happened, Anger when he's talking to Rooter, Depression when he loses all interest in eating, Searching when he momentarily sees his mother in his own shadow and finally Acceptance when he resigns himself to continuing the journey alone.  The sequence is striking in its immersive approach to bereavement, showing it as a complicated and painful process that can be worked through only very gradually, but does it necessarily benefit the film as a whole?  Yes and no - it's not without its emotional pay-off, but it slows down what's already a very episodic and uneven story, and some of the individual moments work a lot better than others.  The "searching" episode is undeniably poignant, but the "anger" episode, in which Littlefoot encounters a gruff old scolosaurus named Rooter (Hingle again) who offers him a bit of worldly wisdom, feels belaboured and heavy-handed, with Rooter massively overstating the very same lessons that Simba would learn a lot more succinctly following the death of Mufasa.  The most interesting thing Rooter has to say is that Littlefoot's loss was "nobody's fault" and simply a part of the "Great Circle of Life" - remember that, because the film itself seems to forget it later on, when it dishes out an exceedingly brutal punishment for Sharptooth for doing nothing more than following his own natural instincts.  The "depression" episode is largely taken up by an extended sequence in which a family of baby pteranodans resembling chibi versions of Heckle and Jeckle squabble over berries, perhaps to alleviate the gravitas somewhat - total fluff, but it does lead to a rather sweet moment where one of the babies becomes aware of Littlefoot's sadness and attempts to console him with a berry (a remarkable act of compassion and generosity for a world where "stick to your own kind" is the prevailing convention).

Shortly after resuming the journey, Littlefoot is reunited with Cera, who was also separated from her family in the earthquake, and suggests that they join forces - initially, she refuses, thinking that to have any kind of symbiotic relationship with a long neck would be a disservice to her species, but it isn't long before she has a change of heart.  In the meantime, Littlefoot encounters excitable saurolophus Ducky (Judith Barsi) and Petrie (Will Ryan), a neurotic pteranodan who got ditched by his family because he was never able to master the basic techniques of flying, and allows the two to accompany him on his journey to The Great Valley.  Ducky very much embodies what I referred to earlier as that "twee, cloying" element that runs deep through Bluth's work and does not mesh well with his efforts to be dark and dramatic.  She's nowhere near as insufferably cutesy as Fieval from An American Tail, if only by virtue of the fact that she's not the central character, but her repetitive, infantile speech mannerisms (she has a habit of saying everything thrice) are milked for all their saccharine, oh-so-very "precious" worth and threaten to make the film unendurable for anyone over the age of six.  As I slag Ducky off to the moon and back, I remain deeply sensitive to the fact that Barsi, who also voiced Anne-Marie in All Dogs Go To Heaven, died a tragic and appalling death at the hands of her alcoholic father on 25th July 1988, and that both of the Bluth films she starred in were released posthumously.  It's an immensely harrowing story, and I wish to emphasise that I mean no disrespect or callousness toward Barsi herself, but for the life of me I just can't stomach her character here.  Maybe it had more potency back in November 1988 when people were still reeling from the shock of Barsi's demise, but Ducky is just so ghastly and unappealing on her own terms (and not simply because of how she talks; she's also got these enormous dewy eyes which make her look like some kind of grotesque Disney caricature).  Petrie's another pint-sized comic relief character whose shtick is rooted in clownish antics and peculiar grammar, although he's used a lot less imposingly than Ducky.  Ryan was apparently chosen as his voice actor at the insistence of Spielberg's son, who wanted him to sound like Digit, the cockroach from An American Tail - a serviceable choice, although Ryan does stick out like a sore thumb in a cast of otherwise youthful voice actors, causing me confusion as a kid as to how old he was supposed to be (before seeing his mother and siblings at the end of the film, I honestly assumed that Petrie was an undersized adult).  Rounding off the motley herd is Spike, a mute stegosaurus who hatches from an egg found by Ducky - friendly, simple-minded and gluttonous, Spike is supposedly meant to be evocative of a dog (he was modeled after Bluth's own Chow Chow, Cubby), although mostly he comes across as being mentally-challenged.  Conveniently, the lost and orphaned young dinosaurs are all plant eaters (actually, I believe that pteranodan ate fish, but I guess that Petrie's family all upped and left before he had a chance to garner this knowledge), which saves them the messy dilemma of what to do if a frightened young carnivore had wanted tag along with them to The Great Valley.*

Their journey is...not exactly uneventful, but there's surprisingly little cumulative effect in how each point in the narrative flows into the next - essentially, the characters just wander onward until the film makes it past the 60 minute mark and we can finally get to The Great Valley and wrap things up.  The fivesome have a couple more run-ins with Sharptooth and get up to a bit of squabbling among themselves but, perhaps in part due to how much editing was undergone in post-production, these fail to gel into a strong or tightly structured story.  Ducky and Spike have no real arcs to speak of, while Petrie's ongoing struggle to get the hang of flight proves routine and dispensable.  The most compelling and meaningful arc comes from the rivalry that develops between Littlefoot and Cera, with the other three dinosaurs toing and froing on whether to put their trust in Littlefoot's quiet, steadfast faith in his mother's wisdom or in Cera's aggressive displays of bravado.  Due to the disjointed nature of the narrative, their shifting allegiances aren't always clearly motivated, however.  There's an especially awkward portion of the story where Cera insists on splintering from the rest of the group and Ducky, Petrie and Spike inexplicably choose to follow her instead of Littlefoot (they argue that "Cera's away is easier" but it's not clear what evidence they're basing that on, exactly).  As it turns out, its sole purpose is to set up for a dramatic sequence where the four infidels find themselves in deep dino-dung due to Cera's crappy leadership, and Littlefoot must come in and single-handedly save them all.

As to our recurring antagonist Sharptooth, I hinted earlier that I wasn't a fan of how his arc concludes, with Littlefoot proposing that the dinosaurs work together to bump Sharptooth off, prompting a grand climactic lesson in teamwork that's built around an act of premeditated murder. There's something about the heroes purposely conspiring to eliminate their enemy through cold and calculated means that honestly doesn't sit well with me, particularly in light of Rooter's earlier comments about the harsher intricacies of the Great Circle of Life being "nobody's fault."  Sharptooth is the kind of villain I could see being genuinely frightening to small children, so I'm sure that the film's target audience would just take comfort in him being gone, perhaps drawing reassurance from the implication that we can overcome the darkness in this world, no matter how gargantuan, if we're willing to work together.  I'm pretty sure I felt the exact same way when I was part of the target audience.  As an adult, though, I would assert that there's nothing inherently wicked about Sharptooth and that he has an equally valid place in this Great Circle of Life.  All Sharptooth wants to do is eat and survive, like every other dinosaur in the movie, and the script sees fit to punish him for it by having a bolder dropped on his head.  It's during Sharptooth's murder that Petrie's arc about learning to fly finally achieves resolution, leading into the film's single most embarrassing moment - Petrie is dragged down with Sharptooth, and we're goaded to believe that the he might have perished alongside the T-Rex, only for him to pop up miraculously with nary a scratch (after a fair few tears have been milked from his friends, of course).  It's the kind of cheap manipulation that had become all too prevalent in Disney's output by that point (once they'd realised that they could have their cake and eat it, and give the viewers a good heartstring-tugging without having them confront any genuine consequences).  Falling and getting caught between the impact of a T-Rex and a bolder hitting water, it's frankly inconceivable that Petrie could have survived, and beyond ludicrous that he manages to cheat death so facilely and without explanation.  You can use the, "well, it's a movie for children, and they don't care" defence, but that doesn't give credence to the suggestion that Bluth made dark and challenging films that bucked all of Disney's worst trends.

Given that we know that at least ten minutes' worth of footage was cut from the final film, I kept a look out for any obvious edits and inconsistencies which might clue us in as to what was taken out.  I'd like to emphasise that I'm only familiar with the CIC VHS release of this film and have no idea if those deleted scenes ever found their way onto any kind of disc release as a special feature.  My main interest here is in seeing what's evident just from the film itself.  Here's what I can discern:

• The editing during the earthquake sequence feels somewhat scrambled - Littlefoot's mother is seen running right behind Littlefoot and Cera, only to become separated from them abruptly.  Sharptooth takes a nasty tumble at one point, only to be upright and running again in the blink of an eye.  I'll also wager that at least part of the battle between Littlefoot's mother and Sharptooth was cut; something about it doesn't quite flow.
• There's the ultra-confusing sequence where Cera, ever the false prophet, finds a small group of trees and mistakes this for The Great Valley, and then attracts a stampede of strange long necks with her rampant gloating.  As the long necks crash through a rocky tunnel the young dinosaurs are traversing, Ducky and Spike get trapped in the falling rubble, yet they're absolutely fine a second later.
• I'll hazard a guess that something of Cera's alternative route was originally glimpsed BEFORE she decides to split from Littlefoot.  As noted above, the other dinosaurs indicate that they already know what she's talking about, whereas the viewer has no such means of knowing.
• Ducky and Spike in peril again!  As Cera leads the foolish defectors across the pits, Spike stops for a quick graze and gets himself and Ducky left behind.  Initially, their being separated is all that Ducky seems distressed about.  Then when Littlefoot shows up rescue them we see that things have majorly hit the fan for Ducky and Spike; the ledge on which they were standing has disintegrated on both sides, leaving them trapped and in danger of being swallowed up by lava. What's missing, clearly, are the scenes in which their peril intensifies.
• While we're at it, it's also not clear what Littlefoot was even doing at the tar pits - did he choose to follow his friends out of concern/loyalty, or was he alerted by their screaming?  As it is, he just seems to show up at the most convenient possible moment.
• Immediately after defeating Sharptooth, Littlefoot seeks out his mother's form in the clouds and announces his intention to give up in the search for The Great Valley, on the basis that reaching it is proving too hard.  Okay, so what prompted this exactly?  Shouldn't the group's victory over Sharptooth have bolstered his confidence?  Initially, I wondered if Littlefoot was perhaps disheartened by the apparent demise of Petrie, but clearly not, as he calls out his name at the end along with the others.  This adds further fuel to my view that there seems to be very little strong or logical progression from one stage of the heroes' journey to the next, and that the film basically stops once it's gone on for long enough.  As it is, Littlefoot has his crisis of faith here not because it actually makes sense for him to do so in the context of the story, but because it's required to set up for the ending.

There are two moments which I'd like to single out from the final sequence at the Great Valley - firstly, a lovely, subtle moment where Cera is reunited with her father and he visibly flinches, as if he's expecting her to headbutt him (as has been her standard greeting up until now), only for her to nuzzle him affectionately.  It's the kind of understated character interaction which I wish that this film had had a lot more trust in.  Secondly, when Ducky is reunited with her family, she declares Spike their new sibling and they let him in with no questions asked.  So...whatever happened segregation being the dominating principle of dinosaur culture?  Ducky's parents haven't just been on a life-changing journey in which they were forced to co-operate with several different species of dinosaur, so why are they suddenly so obliging at the prospect of having to raise another species' young?  (On that note, I also wonder if something was cut regarding what happened to Spike's parents, as they're the only ones who aren't accounted for at the Great Valley).  The film concludes by telling us that all five dinosaurs were fruitful and multiplied, and that the story of their great journey was passed down by their descendants from generation to generation.  Until that fateful day when the big rock fell down from the sky, of course.  There's only so much optimism you can seriously impart when wrapping up a story about dinosaurs.

*I'm aware that this was the plot of the first direct-to-video sequel, of which I've yet to make it through an excess of eight minutes.

The Rugrats' Guide To Terror - "Special Delivery"

The partner episode of "Real or Robots?" is "Special Delivery", a story which somehow manages to be even edgier despite dealing with less overtly nightmarish subject matter.  Stu constructs a hideous talking doll that would psychologically scar the wits out out of any child unfortunate enough to lock eyes with it, Tommy and his friends grapple with the question of where babies come from and later on Tommy sees a dead body.  Ladies and gentleman, welcome to another dark and demented day in the unnerving lives of the Rugrats.  "Special Delivery" follows a formula that was fairly common in the early days of Rugrats, in which Tommy (and Tommy alone) would go for a wander around a distinctly un-kid friendly environment, a scenario which in real life would result in somebody finding Tommy's crushed and mangled body and Stu and Didi being sent down for criminal neglect.  Actually, if you want a dark subtext to go with Rugrats then you scarce need look further than the gruesome displays of parenting we get in just about every episode - obviously some suspension of disbelief is required in the interests of facilitating a story, but if your one-year-old son is seriously able to to stowaway in a mailbag and go on an adventure around the sorting office without you so much as noticing, then clearly there is something terribly wrong with how you prioritise the running of your household.

While Stu is down in the basement pouring blood, sweat and tears into his latest abomination, a talking doll named Patty Pants that keeps malfunctioning, Tommy is in the hallway checking out Spike's daily display of animosity toward the mailman.  Included in today's delivery is a mail order catalogue from the Eggbert toy company, and Stu is distressed to learn about Tina Trousers, a talking doll that boasts similar features to Patty Pants but is superior in every way, right down to getting realistic diaper rash (Christ, who on earth wants to play with that?).  Stu is miserable about being beaten to the punch, but Didi assures him that the actual Tina Trousers probably isn't anywhere near as good as her ad makes out and encourages him to order the doll and see for himself.  Suddenly Stu brightens and decides to order a Tina Trousers of his own for next-day delivery.  Didi tells Tommy that a new baby will be coming for them in the mail tomorrow and Tommy, still being far too young to have an inkling of how the reproductive process works, takes this to mean that he's getting a new baby sister and she'll be delivered through the hole in the door.

Tommy later tries to explain this to Phil, Lil and Chuckie while they're sharing a playpen.  Phil and Lil remark that it's strange, as their mom has been talking about getting a new baby recently too. Their comments on the matter are a bit odd, as it's not altogether clear if they're also getting a doll or if we're meant to pick up the implicit suggestion that Betty thinks she might be pregnant again.  The twins' heated disagreement on whether the new baby will be coming from the "stork" or the "store" doesn't exactly clarify matters.  Chuckie butts in to point out that his mother (a robot or zombie, thanks to the joys of retconning) informs him that he came from the hospital, prompting to Tommy to respond with one of the all-time great Rugrats one-liners: "The hospital?  Nah, that's where you go when you're sick."

The following morning, Tommy is anxious to meet his new sister and opts to wait by the door until she arrives.  When the mailman finally does show (following a sequence in which he's harassed by a slew of neighbourhood mongrels), Stu takes command of the situation and demands to know where his Tina Trousers is.  Turns out, Tina Trousers comes in such bulky, environmentally-unfriendly packaging that Stu will have to go down to the sorting office and collect her in person.  While Stu and the mailman are arguing about this, Tommy manages to slip unnoticed into the mailbag and begins rummaging through the contents in the hopes of flushing out his new sibling.  Tommy then gets carried all the way to the sorting office without Stu or Didi apparently ever realising that he's gone.  Danged deadbeats.  The mailman does grumble about his bag feeling so much heavier, but he also remains oblivious to the fact that there's something moving inside; perhaps he's too preoccupied with fending off another local cur looking to make mincemeat of him.

Once Tommy arrives at the sorting office, he escapes the mailbag and tries to locate his new sibling, and the rest of the episode revolves around the naive baby winding up in gut-wrenchingly perilous predicaments with the office employers remaining none the wiser - in one man's case because he's distracted by the centrefold in a sleazy magazine aimed at male postal workers (under the title "True Mail Man").  Among other things, Tommy nearly suffocates from having a postage label slapped across his mouth, is dragged through an x-ray machine and exposed to god-knows what levels of radiation, and then finally gets packed off to a dead letter office, past The Point of No Return Address, where he very nearly gets to spend eternity alongside the rotting remains of a dead postal worker who evidently got lost in the system several years ago.  Yep, that's right - we get a good, clear glimpse of his disintegrating skeleton and all.  Nowadays, I have to appreciate just how wickedly, hilariously demented this entire sequence is, and how masterfully it transforms this ostensibly mundane working environment into a nightmarish labyrinth of endless twists and turns, topped off with a macabre sight gag hinting that something seriously horrifying went down in this post office once upon a time (did he slip and fall while trying to retrieve a lost package?  Was his body disposed there by an unseen assailant?).  As a kid, though, I distinctively recall staring into that dead postal worker's empty eye sockets and being knocked for six with sheer terror.  It's an incredibly dark and unsettling gag to insert into a cartoon aimed at a young audience, although it does succeed in hammering home the message that sorting offices don't make the safest of playgrounds, and that not everyone is going to have the same insane amount of hide-saving luck as Tommy.

Tommy manages to escape by pulling on a lever and opening up a chute which allows him to slide to the safety of a mail trolley, where he lands conveniently close to Stu's Tina Trousers doll.  Tommy realises that this must be the baby and attempts to strike up a conversation with Tina, apparently not twigging that she's a fake and only capable of saying "Mamma!" ad nauseam.  Either Tina Trousers is a shocking realistic doll (in which case Stu plainly does have something to fear) or Tommy's very easily duped, even by one-year-old standards.

Meanwhile, Stu has arrived at the sorting office and gets into a confrontation with a blase postal clerk over the whereabouts of his package - during this scene, I find my eyes wandering to the anti-nuke poster in the backdrop reading DON'T HUG YOUR KIDS WITH NUCLEAR ARMS (that's all we needed to make this episode just that little bit more nightmarish - a reference to impending nuclear destruction).  Stu notices that the Tina Trousers box has been torn open and grumbles about the declining standards in the postal service.  He caries the box away, unaware that it contains the doll he ordered AND his runaway infant son, and we get another sight gag suggesting that the clerk is still clinging to glory days from a time when he had vibrantly-coloured hair and was made employee of the month.

Very little else of note happens for the remainder of the episode.  Stu gets the doll home and never has any inkling of how his irresponsible parenting nearly resulted in his child becoming body no. 2 in a dead letter office vault, Tommy continues to converse with the doll as if it were real, then finally Grandpa Lou walks in and, mistaking Tommy for the doll, picks him up and dangles him by the leg, which Tommy finds inexplicably amusing.  All in all, the story just kind of fizzles. We never do learn if Tina Trousers confirmed Stu's worst nightmares (although I note that he ultimately unboxes the toy with all the enthusiasm of a child who's genuinely excited at the prospect of having something new to play with), Patty Pants is never seen again (happily) nor do we get to bear witness to Tommy's crushing disappointment upon discovering that his new baby sister is a plastic imposter, even if she does get realistic diaper rash.  Essentially, this belongs to that highly glib model of endings where nothing especially goes anywhere or gets resolved, but we're given the illusion of closure because multiple characters are laughing in unison right before we fade out.  In narrative terms, "Special Delivery" is frankly a mess, but I'll be damned if it doesn't contain one of the most gloriously demented sight gags you're ever going to find in a cartoon about articulate infants, and that's more than enough to grant it classic status.  I maintain that the sinister shock ending to "What The Big People Do" still has it beat in the blood-curdling stakes, but the sight of that dead, decaying postal worker is grisly, grisly stuff, and understandably going to warp a few impressionable young souls.