Not Bad...

 

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

2008-13, 2014, 2015, 2019-

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Pros: Humanizing the Clones, Some Good Character Moments,  Voice Cast Battles

Cons: Doesn’t Explore Motivations of Separatists Enough, Some Slow Arcs

         Considering how bad Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars movie was, I was a bit close-minded toward his resultant show.  It also didn’t help that I greatly preferred Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars and still do.  When I finally checked it out, it took a few episodes to finally become worth watching, but it turned out to be decent.  It does some things well, but in some ways it falls short of its potential.  There was an entire galaxy of potential and complexity here, after all.

         The show focuses on many points of view.  Primarily we get those of Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor).  Their friendship is handled well throughout the show, and Anakin’s potential fall from grace is more credible with his disillusionment with the compromises made by the Jedi.  His apprentice Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) also develops into a likable, strong character despite her initial scrappy status in the movie.  The political aspect of the war is shown through Padme Amidala’s (Catherine Taber) eyes, helping her becoming more than just a love interest.  Other characters include the clones (Dee Bradley Baker), Yoda (Tom Kane), Chancellor Palpatine (Ian Abercrombie, then Tim Curry), Count Dooku (Corey Burton), Jar Jar (Ahmed Best),  Mace Windu (Terrence C. Carson), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), Nute Gunray (Tom Kenny), Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman), Cad Bane (Corey Burton), Bail Organa (Phil LaMarr), Boba Fett (Daniel Logan), Captain Typho (James C. Mathis III), Mon Mothma (Kath Soucie), Tarkin (Stephen Stanton), Jabba (Kevin Michael Richardson), Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Schmi Skywalker (Pernilla August), Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), and Matthew Wood as General Grievous and the battle droids.  Other voices include Olivia d’Abo, Robin Atkins Downes, Dave Filoni, Brian George, Anna Graves, Jennifer Hale, Angelique Perrin, Meredith Salenger, Jason Spisak, Tasia Valenza, Seth Green, David Tennant, Ron Perlman, James Hong, Michael York, George Takei, Simon Pegg, and Mark Hamill.  Voice acting is very good.  I like how the show utilizes voice actors, and Star Wars could make use of them for an animated movie (cc: Disney).  There’s plenty of good mimicry, and James Arnold Taylor, Matt Lanter, and Dee Bradley Baker are particularly versatile.  I commented on this before, but I do not like the WW2 newsreel-style recaps by narrator Tom Kane, as it seems out of place in the franchise.   

           The animation is as good as the movie, which is good for the show and bad for the movie.  The scenery is very creative and the production design is original.  This is often used depicted protracted battles.  They are pretty good (particularly the 2^nd Battle of Geonosis, which is a huge improvement over the first), but I wish they had focused more on the subtleties of the politics.  Worldbuilding is pretty good when we get it.  For example, Mandalore is reimagined cleverly as a developed, progressive planet while maintaining the old canon in the form of a rebellious group of reactionary patricians who have fallen out of favor.  Still, the civilization’s pacifism leaves it open to attack.  Dathomirian Nightsisters also return as an alternative group of force users led by the sinister Mother Talzin (Barbara Goodson) who have an alliance with the Sith.  Less enjoyable is the Mortis arc, which is tediously vague spiritualism that smacks of blatant Midichlorian overcompensation.

            The biggest problem with the show is how it fails to realize the “heroes on both sides” angle.  There is next to no development on the various potentially sympathetic motivations for the Separatists.  Instead, all its leaders are one-dimensional, greedy monsters.  Their blatant oppression of occupied systems may make sense as part of Palpatine’s plan to turn public opinion toward the stability of the Empire, but surely there would be some idealistic Separatists who would call this out.  The most we get is an episode about a friend of Padme’s who is a member of the Separatist Senate and is only vaguely opposed to the “corruption” of the Republic.  She blindly trusts Dooku despite evidence to the contrary.  There is a touch of Trumpism here: people so fed up with the corruption that they turn to even more blatantly corrupt people because it’s all the same to them now.  Dooku himself displays no humanity or complexity save for feeling slightly bad when Palpatine orders him to kill Asajj off.  I never found him an interesting character, and his backstory is frustrating because suggests some complex motivation that apparently isn’t there.  Star Wars sometimes has a problem with having delve even deeper into supplementary material for depth, as if six seasons of a show aren’t enough.   General Grievous is also disappointing, getting humiliated too many times throughout the series (he gets better, though).  The battle droids are walking jokes as well.

          And it’s not like there isn’t enough material to work with for this complexity.  The Republic is extremely flawed, as it allowed something like the events of Episode I to happen.  More importantly, the Jedi Order forcibly takes people’s children to train them as soldiers.  That alone seems like enough to rebel over but we hear little of that.  At least one system has separated itself peacefully from the Jedi over this, but the show seems to victim-blame them as this leaves them vulnerable for the antagonists of the episode.  

NARRATOR: You did and you are.

          One thing the show does beautifully is humanizing the Clone Troopers.  Each of them have formed a distinct personality, and Dee Bradley Baker does a great job conveying that.  They struggle with their experiences of war while being denied their personhood and feelings because they were “just” clones who were “designed” for this.  The show reconciles this with Order 66 by revealing that they had an organic chip installed in their brains that would override their will when the command was given.  A great breakout protagonist is CT-7567/”Rex,” who gets the most development out of the bunch.   

            The show has a few more interesting characters.  Cad Bane, despite his ridiculously out-of-place cowboy hat’s being a little too Western, is a badass antagonist with an awesome voice.  Hondo Ohnaka (Jim Cummings) is an ambiguously likable scoundrel with a complex relationship with the war.  He’s fun, but he sometimes does things too evil for his “gentleman pirate” characterization to work.

             

The important thing is that Jim Cummings is still getting work.

            In a rather ill-advised move, the show decides to revive Darth Maul (Sam Witwer), and, no, it does not trouble itself with explaining his apparent resurrection.  It’s a sacrifice of logic in favor of fanservice, especially since Maul is far more intelligent and calculating than he is in the Episode I.  There is some interesting motivation behind him, as he feels robbed him of his supposed destiny as a Sith master.  We also get some great voicework from Witwer and Clancy Brown, who plays his brother Savage Oppress.  This moment is amusing as well.

              The show is generally divided up into 4-episode arcs of varying quality, and it can be found on Netflix.  It’s easier to get through if you just skip the ones you find boring.  There is some cheating of chronological order, especially the events surrounding Bane’s breaking Ziro the Hutt (Corey Burton) out of prison.  The show was cancelled in 2013 with a final season’s (“The Lost Missions”) getting released on Netflix in 2014.  A few unfinished episodes were released on StarWars.com, and a revival series will debut on Disney streaming next year.

Dreamworks at Its Worst

Antz

1998

D: Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson

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Pros: Technically Good Animation for the Time

Cons: Off-Putting Character Design, Lazy Humor, Awkward Tone

        I remember when Signs came out, and we all thought it was the greatest thing.  Then, once the novelty wore off, we realized it was an incredibly silly movie.  I’ve always been surprised by how Antz has somehow dodged this bullet.  It’s like everybody was impressed by all these new-fangled 3-D animated movies with hip metahumor and no music.  Considering the almost complete lack of any redeeming features in this film, there should have been an epiphany, but people still insist is a good movie.  I guess sometimes I have to take out the trash myself.

        There is some notorious controversy surrounding the production of this movie.  Dreamworks producer Jeffrey Katzenberger butted heads with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter of Pixar because both companies were making an animated movie about ants.  Whoever started the conflict is moot to me since A Bug’s Life is clearly the superior movie.  Colorful, cute, and passably entertaining, it borders between decent and watchable enough to watch with the kids, even if it’s not really Pixar’s best work.  Just about every one of Pixar’s movies at least passes the Park-a-Kid-in-Front-of-It-While-You-Do-Something-Else Test.  Heck, I’d even park a kid in front of Cars.*  Antz doesn’t even pass that test.  It’s hard to believe Dreamworks made this the same year they came out with the excellent Prince of Egypt.

        The movie’s protagonist Z (Woody Allen) is unsatisfied with life as a worker ant, as he explains to a therapist (Paul Mazursky) in the first scene (a lazy cliché meant for character exposition).  He goes to a bar and inadvertently meets and falls in love with Princess Bala (Sharon Stone), who is also unsatisfied with her life.  So we know already this is a cliched setup with a cliched romance between classes.  Z, wanting some change of scenery switches positions with a soldier ant friend named Weaver (Sylvester Stallone).  In the process, Weaver falls in love with a no-nonsense worker ant Azteca (Jennifer Lopez).  Coincidentally the villainous General Mandible (Gene Hackman) is scheming to destroy the colony and start a new one, and on this day he sends the soldier ants loyal to the Queen (Anne Bancroft) on a suicide mission against a colony of termites.  His conspiracy also involves tricking the worker ants into digging a tunnel straight into a puddle, drowning them.  Z and Bala have a typical isolated-from-society odd couple adventure before they finally thwart Mandible’s plan, save the colony, improve its social structure, and end up together as a couple.  Standard stuff, really.  At one point, there is a town of other insects that reinforces the suspicious similarity between this and A Bug’s Life.

       The casting is standard A-List celebrity stuff, and unlike in many such animated movies, it doesn’t justify itself with surprisingly good performances.  Every role is just a lazy caricature of an archetype each actor is generally typecast in.  The Lazy Self-Parody.  Christopher Walken, on the other hand, sounds a bit distracting as Cutter, a drone who acts as Mandible’s reluctant collaborator.  The one celebrity who works well in a movie is Danny Glover, who voices Barbatus, a soldier ant who befriends Z on his day in the military.  I’ve never liked Glover as an actor, but I’ve pointed out that his voice works in animation; it has a warm quality that fits this character.  When I cite Danny Glover as a redeeming feature in a movie, though, that’s a bad sign.  I’ve always had a bias toward using voice actors in voice roles, and it was nice to hear Jim Cummings voice an inconsequential extra in this movie.  Other voices include Grant Shaud, John Mahoney, and Jerry Sroka.

        The humor leaves much to be desired.  Many of the jokes are just clichés modified with formic terminology.  There are a few lazy references [Z at one point does a blatant Batman Twosie while dancing with Bala, and one of the few funny lines is lifted directly from Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask (“I was going to include you in my most erotic fantasies, but now you can just write it off”)].  Some animated movies are just watered-down mockeries of classic movies, and that’s what this is to Woody Allen movies.  There are a maybe couple decent lines, but they can be written off as flukes.  The movie has far more vulgar jokes and bad words than you’d expect a PG-animated movie to get away with, so much so that it seems like it’s using it as a crutch to look “edgy.”  

      Another problem that really screws with this movie’s tone is its awkward attempts at dark humor.  An ant is mesmerized and predictably vaporized by a magnifying glass.  A pair of snooty wasps (Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin) who speak with Mid-Atlantic accent (GET IT?) are such joke characters that I’m not sure I’m not supposed to be amused when one reacts appropriately to the other’s sudden and senseless death.  This problem even ruins a climactic scene involving a character’s death.  Barbatus’ fate is revealed after the Termite battle when he asks “Be honest, kid, am I hurt bad?” only to reveal that there is nothing left of him but his head.  The way the scene plays out makes it honestly confusing whether it’s meant to be funny or sad, and it ends up being ineffective.  The movie seems to mistake edginess for sophistication, but it would be better off it was consistently earnest in its darkness like The Lion King or a Don Bluth movie.

      Probably the most noticeable flaw with the movie is its look.  While the 3D Animation was  technically good for its time, it’s dominated by a drab color palette that doesn’t work well in early CGI, which usually tended to make things look shiny.  Instead, it looks grotesque and ugly.  And then there are the character designs.  Unless you’re trying to be subversive or you’re making a horror movie, then it’s generally a good idea to heed a widely-recognized rule of design that non-human things with human faces are incredibly creepy and off-putting.  That’s just common sense.  Now there are some rules this doesn’t apply to: generally humanoid characters with non-human attributes (Gargoyles and Na’vi) and cartoonishly bipedal characters (Bee Movie), but these characters are literally ants with human faces.  Who would want to stare at that for 80 minutes?  This gets even more frustrating when you look at some of the concept art for the characters:

Wow, look at these creative, colorful, and appealing designs, and this…

…this is what they freaking went with?!   

It’s also worth noting that the conceptual designs would be more suited to the limitations of the animation at the time. The chitinous surfaces would look less off-putting if you didn’t need to flex them like facial skin.  There’s an interesting contrast between this fecklessness and Pixar’s prudence.  Pixar recognized that the technology was new so they made their first movie about toys while keeping human characters in the background for practice until they were finally confident enough to make a movie about them.

        I find it rather odd that the same people who still like Antz seem to hate Shark Tale, even though practically everything that was wrong with Shark Tale was wrong with Antz.  In fact, I even think Shark Tale, for all its flaws and piscine puns, had far more funny moments than Antz, and a nicer color palette to boot.  It’s an example of people reacting to a follow-up the way they should have reacted to the first work (The Cars 2 Effect).  Even more baffling, the same people also dis on Bee Movie, which actually was the funny, clever satire Antz should have been.  Antz kicked off the typ of hip, knowing humor of early CG animation that Dreamworks later did much better with Shrek even though we eventually got tired of it. 

*Not literally, of course.

QUOTES:

[after lengthy insecure rant]

Z: The whole system makes me feel... insignificant!

THERAPIST: Excellent. You've made a real breakthrough.

Z: I have?

THERAPIST: Yes, Z.  You have.  You are insignificant.

Z: So, these... these termites, they're... they're, they're... these guys aren't going to put up much of a fight, right? I mean, we're talking about pushovers, right?

BARBATUS: Not really, kid. They're five times our size and spit acid from their foreheads.

BARBATUS: [dying] Don't make my mistake, kid. Don't follow orders your whole life. Think for yourself.

Z: And... you know, he just died in my arms like that. I... You know, I don't think he ever once, in his life, made his own choice