So my parents just got Disney+ this last month (hi, Mom!) and are probably looking for one or two things to watch on the new streaming service while sheltering in place (which everybody should still be doing, by the way). The thing is, though, that they aren’t especially big fans of animation (strange for Disney+ subscribers, I know, but true). So I thought I could give them a few bespoke suggestions of what to watch during their first month of Disney+. And if you need a little break from all of the animation zipping around 24/7, well, feel free to watch along with them.
Treasure Island (1950) – Although people seem to forget that it was the case, for a while there in the mid-twentieth century, Disney wasn’t doing so hot. After their initial success with Snow White (1937), Disney’s surprisingly avant-garde tastes (certainly relative to those of his carefully cultivated “man of the people” public image and the family-friendly pablum that his company is generally known for) and high-end productions got him in hot water with his creditors. Several high-profile flops, a fierce animator strike and the shift in wartime focus away from fanciful entertainments nearly bankrupted the titan of animation. It was a string of military-grade wartime propaganda, Latin American-centered features and live action programmers that saw Disney through the war and its aftermath (and, even then, Japanese media company Snario – yes, the people who make Hello Kitty – tried laying claim to the vacated throne of global animation in the wake of Disney’s death in 1966, so damaged was the company’s status, which is itself a long and bizarre story well-worth reading up on). And while the live-action films of this period are perhaps better remembered for their talking dogs, sassy cats and intelligent cars, they did have a string of solid literary adaptations that brought well-worn classics to life in the typically Disney style. And while many might prefer other, more modern pirate and high seas adventures, Treasure Island is actually well above the curve in that regard (trust me, I had to sit through that atrocious Louis Buñuel Robinson Caruso the other night) and a fun little insight into a little-discussed period of Disney’s otherwise thoroughly picked-over history.
Turner & Hooch (1989) – A grim reality of the current pandemic is that anybody with stomach enough to pay attention has an endless parade of deaths to sift through every week, from Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) to Nobuhuko Obayashi (House) to Jerry Stiller (Seinfeld) to Lynn Shelton (Your Sister’s Sister) and Denise Cronenberg (Dead Ringers) and many more. We even came within a hair’s breadth of losing Tom Hanks: one of the kindest, most celebrated and most widely beloved people working in Hollywood – who was both the perfect choice to play Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks (2013) and Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). And while I too dearly love his mid-to-late career dramatic turn – including his back-to-back Oscar wins for Philadelphia (1993) and Forest Gump (1994), Apollo 13 (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998), You’ve Got Mail (1998), Cast Away (2000), Captain Philips (2013), The Post (2017), all four Toy Stories (1995-2019)… you get the idea – his early comedy work from the 1980s is still fertile ground for moviegoers to delve headlong into. While the best of these is arguably his star-making turn in Big (1988), the irascible Turner & Hooch is undoubtedly the most fun: a goofy buddy cop movie where Hanks is paired up with a dog looking to avenge his murdered owner (for whose murder he is the only witness).
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993) – Whereas Treasure Island is nominally interesting in retrospect given how downright ordinary it feels relative to the better remembered magical realism family comedies of the same period, the animated movies that have defined them historically and the action blockbusters that are keeping the lights on these days, this remake of an older and somewhat more obscure talking animal adventure movie. This version, though, is excellent: a fun, better-than-necessary odyssey of lost pets desperately trying to make it back to their home and their humans when they’re dropped off on a remote farm during a family trip. It’s fun, funny and fiendishly effective at getting us to care about voiced-over actors reading their lines in the guise of mugging household pets.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) – Especially considering how monumentally terrible every last one of its sequels has been over the last 17 years, the first Pirates of the Caribbean is kind of a miracle of filmmaking, both in terms of how great it was to watch for the first time in 2003 and how well it’s ultimately held up in all the years since then. Let’s not forget, pirate movies were a wholly dead genre at the turn of the millennium – had been for decades – and this had the added disadvantages of an utterly incomprehensible Johnny Depp performance, helmed by a director best known for a gut-wrenching horror movie and being based off of a memorable-but-not-terribly-great theme park ride that was notably light on narrative (you know, the thing that would-be blockbusters kind of need in order to move between sweeping action set-pieces). And yet, despite all that (maybe even because of the peculiar alchemy of throwing all of them into the same movie together with a few rising young stars at its center) the movie 100% works as-is. Depp is giving a mesmeric performance as the bizarrely off-kilter Captain Jack Sparrow, Gore Verbinski acquits himself admirably with all of the kid-friendly horror elements, the entire production felt so incredibly fresh because there were so few other movies working in the same mold and the fact that it was adapted from something so story-light meant that Verbinski & Co. were free to fit whatever action or comedy bits they wanted into the incredibly loose narrative framework that it afforded them. And other than some occasionally dodgy special effects and the apocalyptic knowledge of what this franchise would eventually devolve into, it makes for a rip-roaringly good time at home while all of the country’s movie theaters are shut down.
Black Panther (2018) – Representation in media matters: it always has and always will. Communities, especially marginalized ones, need to be able to tell their stories in authentic ways that speak to their truth, to their experience, what they understand the world to be. While there is so much to be said of the recent arc of Black filmmaking in the US film industry at large (especially as regards the mid-decade clarion call of #OscarsSoWhite and the eventual Oscar win for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight) and of Black Panther in particular (which very nearly walked away with the Best Picture Oscar itself in the 2019 ceremony) – certainly far more than can be confined to a single paragraph-long recommendation – suffice it to say that Black Panther is the poster child for why the mantra of “representation matters” is both so necessary and so powerful. It is an epically scoped, massively ambitious and revolutionarily told story that speaks to the trials and tribulations and generations of moviegoers, activists and citizens at large. It presents a sterling vision of a world that might have been while acknowledging the moral complexities and soul-scouring pain of the world that unfortunately is. It is crucially important filmmaking smuggled into theaters (and now televisions) in the candy-coated exterior of a four-quadrant blockbuster. If that’s not an unreserved recommendation, I don’t know what is.