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Two Animated Weekends
In keeping up with the “Cartoon Brew” web site, I noticed reports of two “Looney Tunes movies” that had been made only to become entangled in the run-down state of their studio. Coyote vs. Acme became a cause celebre, or at least one recent example of “people want what they cannot have.” Amid rumours of other companies trying to acquire the rights to it, though, the other movie did get to the point of being picked up. With the impression it was connected to “new Looney Tunes” shorts I’d heard about but never quite got around to tracking down, I did start thinking it might be interesting to see The Day the Earth Blew Up.
Although aware a theatrical release was impending, I was still surprised to see reports it had opened. Given the reports had mentioned it not making very much money, I was left hoping it would stay in theatres for a second weekend. That next weekend, though, I wasn’t feeling very well and didn’t go out. After recovering I checked the web site for the multiplex over the city line I’ve been to a number of times in the past two years. The Day the Earth Blew Up was still listed, but now I was surprised to see Princess Mononoke in the list of screenings. Reports of a theatrical reissue for it had also got my attention, but not to the point of knowing just when it would open either. I did wonder if it was a definitive case of a “one-weekend special showing.” However, I was aware I had a Blu-Ray box of it that I hadn’t got around to opening (where I had taken the shrink wrap off boxes of My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, the other two Ghibli films that seemed to have been deemed notable enough for that special treatment). I also told myself that not only had I seen some “anime at the movies” already this year, I’d seen Princess Mononoke in a theatre around the end of 1999, when it had first been brought to North America.
With that in mind, I stuck with my original plan and went to The Day the Earth Blew Up. Its comedy wasn’t as relentless as the old shorts, but I can suppose that works better at feature length. That it didn’t bring in “everyone,” as I understand the live action-animation hybrids of recent years did, was refreshing in a certain way. It also got my attention that it didn’t seem to play too much with the idea that “the characters are performers“ that had begun to crop up in the old shorts and become still more familiar around the time of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In featuring the “daffy” Daffy Duck of the 1940s (even in a “sci-fi” sort of plot perhaps a little more reminiscent of the 1950s), though, the movie did leave me contemplating how I still seem more familiar with the “post-1948 shorts” on one side of rights being sold years ago; I wonder every so often about being condescended to for tending towards Chuck Jones’s shorts from those later years and told to seek out Bob Clampett’s shorts from the 1940s. At times I might have just thought about the “Warner Brothers TV cartoons of the early 1990s”; maybe that was even a safer standard of comparison. Still, noticing some families with young children in the theatre was a little reassuring that Looney Tunes hasn’t been all but forgotten by the public at large. Then, not that long after I’d seen the movie I saw a report that Coyote vs. Acme had been secured by the people who’d secured this movie, even if I could also wonder about just tracking down and reading the original short story.
The next weekend I checked the theatre site again, and it turned out Princess Mononoke was still listed even if no longer as an IMAX screening (and with a different thumbnail poster). While I did grapple a bit longer with thoughts of my Blu-Ray box, in the end I went to the movies for the second weekend in a row, which is pretty close to a record for me. I was still reflecting on the first time I’d seen the movie, which had involved the English dub and a rather small theatre in a downtown multiplex. This showing happened to be subtitled, although the bigger screen might have to be weighed against the theatre having been refitted with big recliners that make for smaller audiences.
Further differences between “then and now” did start to feel a bit more grandiose. At the end of 1999 I’d moved to start a post-university job, and couldn’t keep dropping back in on friends and acquaintances to continue patronising my campus’s anime club showings. The viewing led into a certain period of limited access to anime, and maybe I do have to contrast that to now not knowing where a lot of recent “domestic animation” is streaming. I can also just recall a certain sense palpable in the comments of others about the tensions surrounding “a Ghibli film over here at last; things are looking up!” and “but it’s not being done right.” Those complaints had extended to the poster at the time. Every so often I do wonder if “the middlemen who bring, or at least once brought, anime over here” soaked up that unfortunate yet apparently inevitable tendency of “gathered fans” to become hostile towards “authority” of whatever sort, and if that just might have helped me stay interested in anime for a peculiar length of time. On the other hand, when I thought to check the Wikipedia entry for Princess Mononoke after seeing it, I happened to see a comment that it, too, had been proclaimed immensely superior to The Phantom Menace from earlier in 1999. That had me wondering about that other excuse I offer that anime fans might not have been quite as quick as fans of domestic live action and written science fiction to break out that package of judgments towards Star Wars that I, at least, found and find unappealing...
I could, anyway, wonder whether 1999 still embodied fragments of the time when “anime” was something new to people. Maybe even Princess Mononoke might be vulnerable to complaints from those who imprinted on the multiple anime features of the 1980s that had helped build fandom over here, but perhaps I was more willing to contrast its violent content and its casual sense of “exotic foreignness” alike to the successful Disney animated features of the 1990s. I’m a little conscious that I haven’t seen any Ghibli movies newer than Spirited Away, but I was at least willing to hope certain long-standing lamentations about Ghibli being “the last remnant of respectability in animation from Japan” no longer weigh on me at least. In any case there were some things about the movie I’d altogether forgotten since the last time I’d seen it, and maybe that added to the theatrical experience.
Although aware a theatrical release was impending, I was still surprised to see reports it had opened. Given the reports had mentioned it not making very much money, I was left hoping it would stay in theatres for a second weekend. That next weekend, though, I wasn’t feeling very well and didn’t go out. After recovering I checked the web site for the multiplex over the city line I’ve been to a number of times in the past two years. The Day the Earth Blew Up was still listed, but now I was surprised to see Princess Mononoke in the list of screenings. Reports of a theatrical reissue for it had also got my attention, but not to the point of knowing just when it would open either. I did wonder if it was a definitive case of a “one-weekend special showing.” However, I was aware I had a Blu-Ray box of it that I hadn’t got around to opening (where I had taken the shrink wrap off boxes of My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, the other two Ghibli films that seemed to have been deemed notable enough for that special treatment). I also told myself that not only had I seen some “anime at the movies” already this year, I’d seen Princess Mononoke in a theatre around the end of 1999, when it had first been brought to North America.
With that in mind, I stuck with my original plan and went to The Day the Earth Blew Up. Its comedy wasn’t as relentless as the old shorts, but I can suppose that works better at feature length. That it didn’t bring in “everyone,” as I understand the live action-animation hybrids of recent years did, was refreshing in a certain way. It also got my attention that it didn’t seem to play too much with the idea that “the characters are performers“ that had begun to crop up in the old shorts and become still more familiar around the time of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In featuring the “daffy” Daffy Duck of the 1940s (even in a “sci-fi” sort of plot perhaps a little more reminiscent of the 1950s), though, the movie did leave me contemplating how I still seem more familiar with the “post-1948 shorts” on one side of rights being sold years ago; I wonder every so often about being condescended to for tending towards Chuck Jones’s shorts from those later years and told to seek out Bob Clampett’s shorts from the 1940s. At times I might have just thought about the “Warner Brothers TV cartoons of the early 1990s”; maybe that was even a safer standard of comparison. Still, noticing some families with young children in the theatre was a little reassuring that Looney Tunes hasn’t been all but forgotten by the public at large. Then, not that long after I’d seen the movie I saw a report that Coyote vs. Acme had been secured by the people who’d secured this movie, even if I could also wonder about just tracking down and reading the original short story.
The next weekend I checked the theatre site again, and it turned out Princess Mononoke was still listed even if no longer as an IMAX screening (and with a different thumbnail poster). While I did grapple a bit longer with thoughts of my Blu-Ray box, in the end I went to the movies for the second weekend in a row, which is pretty close to a record for me. I was still reflecting on the first time I’d seen the movie, which had involved the English dub and a rather small theatre in a downtown multiplex. This showing happened to be subtitled, although the bigger screen might have to be weighed against the theatre having been refitted with big recliners that make for smaller audiences.
Further differences between “then and now” did start to feel a bit more grandiose. At the end of 1999 I’d moved to start a post-university job, and couldn’t keep dropping back in on friends and acquaintances to continue patronising my campus’s anime club showings. The viewing led into a certain period of limited access to anime, and maybe I do have to contrast that to now not knowing where a lot of recent “domestic animation” is streaming. I can also just recall a certain sense palpable in the comments of others about the tensions surrounding “a Ghibli film over here at last; things are looking up!” and “but it’s not being done right.” Those complaints had extended to the poster at the time. Every so often I do wonder if “the middlemen who bring, or at least once brought, anime over here” soaked up that unfortunate yet apparently inevitable tendency of “gathered fans” to become hostile towards “authority” of whatever sort, and if that just might have helped me stay interested in anime for a peculiar length of time. On the other hand, when I thought to check the Wikipedia entry for Princess Mononoke after seeing it, I happened to see a comment that it, too, had been proclaimed immensely superior to The Phantom Menace from earlier in 1999. That had me wondering about that other excuse I offer that anime fans might not have been quite as quick as fans of domestic live action and written science fiction to break out that package of judgments towards Star Wars that I, at least, found and find unappealing...
I could, anyway, wonder whether 1999 still embodied fragments of the time when “anime” was something new to people. Maybe even Princess Mononoke might be vulnerable to complaints from those who imprinted on the multiple anime features of the 1980s that had helped build fandom over here, but perhaps I was more willing to contrast its violent content and its casual sense of “exotic foreignness” alike to the successful Disney animated features of the 1990s. I’m a little conscious that I haven’t seen any Ghibli movies newer than Spirited Away, but I was at least willing to hope certain long-standing lamentations about Ghibli being “the last remnant of respectability in animation from Japan” no longer weigh on me at least. In any case there were some things about the movie I’d altogether forgotten since the last time I’d seen it, and maybe that added to the theatrical experience.