Maverick animator Don Bluth seems determined to go head to head against his former employers at Walt Disney Studios. Just as last year at this time, Bluth`s new feature, ”All Dogs Go to Heaven,” is opening the same day as Disney`s new animated production, ”The Little Mermaid.”
This year, the match is a draw. Where Bluth remains by far the more gifted animator-”Dogs” is filled with sequences of an astounding virtuosity- John Musker and Ron Clements` ”Little Mermaid” achieves a unity of effect that eludes Bluth`s sometimes erratic screenplay. Bluth flies high and hits an air pocket or two; Disney stays low to the ground and gets home.
With ”All Dogs Go to Heaven,” Bluth makes a brave departure from the Disney style-the style that made last year`s ”The Land Before Time” the best Disney feature Disney never made. Pitched toward a slightly older audience,
”Dogs” draws more on the Warner Brothers tradition of fast action, unsentimental characters and wild exaggeration of movement.
The rather too-complex story line, composed by David N. Weiss from ideas contributed by 10 writers, postulates a 1930s New Orleans underworld populated by talking canines. Charlie B. Barkin, a long-faced German shepherd voiced by Burt Reynolds, breaks out of the dog pound with the help of his dachshund companion Itchy (Dom De Luise), intending to re-establish his partnership with the sinister pit bull Carface (Vic Tayback) in a bayou gambling joint.
Bluth, with the touch of the showoff that`s one of the more endearing qualities of his work, seems to have designed his characters with an eye toward posing himself the most problems possible in animating them. He avoids the spherical shapes that are the easiest to put into movement (because they have the advantage of looking much the same from every side), choosing instead elongated, spindly figures with long arms and legs that pose a challenge to perspective with every gesture.
Charlie, who owes an obvious debt to Chuck Jones` Wile E. Coyote, comes equipped with one of the most expressive faces in cartoon history: Bluth keeps his features-ears, snout, mouth, eyes-in constant flux, a beautiful blend of line and volume that represents the pinnacle of the animator`s art.
The backgrounds, too, are presented with detail and depth. Bluth again seems determined to choose the one angle that will demand the most in the complex harmonizing of perspective, and in his long shots he crowds the frame with movement in every corner. When Charlie is killed by a Carface determined to keep the gambling empire to himself, he ascends to a pink and blue heaven filled with floating, ticking timepieces that seems to be Bluth`s attempt to outdo Gepetto`s shop in Disney`s classic ”Pinocchio.” (The sequence, which features Charlie in a duet with an angelic whippet voiced by Melba Moore, is the film`s freest and most charming moment.)
Charlie swipes the pocket watch that represents his own time on Earth, winds it up and returns, looking for revenge on his old partner. It`s here that ”Dogs” gets into narrative trouble, as Charlie cynically befriends a little girl who can talk to animals and uses her gift to bet on horse races. The girl (voiced by Judith Barsi) is cloying and minimally animated, and when the multiplying subplots move into the human world, Bluth resorts to some uncharacteristic cost-cutting by rotoscoping the adult figures (basically, tracing them from live-action film) that results in a serious loss of fluidity and rhythm.
Bluth does pull it out for a marvelous finale, but not before risking the loss of his younger spectators with too many odd turns of action. Still, for any adult admirer of animation, ”All Dogs Go to Heaven” is a must-there`s no one working today who can come within a mile of Bluth at his best.
Meanwhile, back at Walt Disney, ”The Little Mermaid” is certainly the most accomplished and engaging animated feature to emerge from that studio since its change of regime. The disgraceful shoddiness of last year`s ”Oliver and Company” has been replaced by a humming, consistent competence, and there are even a couple of sequences in the film`s last half that seem genuinely inspired.
The great Disney features operate on such a deeply subconscious level that they are, by definition, impossible to self-consciously reproduce. But at least the writer-directors of ”The Little Mermaid,” John Musker and Ron Clements, have tried, though what they have come up with is less a classic Disneyesque exploration of primal psychology than a highly contemporary myth of consumerism.
Hans Christian Andersen`s little mermaid here becomes a kind of underwater valley girl-the blue-eyed, red-haired Ariel (voiced by Jodi Benson)-who lives with her sisters in the regal splendor of a deep ruled by her father, King Triton (Kenneth Mars). Fascinated with the world above the surface, she contents herself with collecting human artifacts from shipwrecks, until she lays eyes on the handsome Prince Eric (a Tom Cruise look-alike voiced by Christopher Daniel Barnes). Rescuing him from a storm at sea, she falls hopelessly in love and bargains her soul to the evil sea witch Ursula
(Pat Carroll) in return for the legs that will allow her to romance Prince Eric on shore.
In one of the film`s most bluntly materialistic moments, Ariel surveys her salvage collection and sings, ”I want more!”-a handy summation of the movie`s acquisitive ethic. Actually, the score-by the authors of the musical version of ”Little Shop of Horrors,” Howard Ashman and Alan Menken-is unusually solid, and the film functions best as a musical. Taking advantage of a license to stylize no longer available to live-action films, the numbers range from an extravagant, Busby Berkeley-like celebration of life undersea to a calypso-based love song in which dozens of aquatic creatures band together to urge the Prince to ”Kiss the Girl.”
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The character design is fairly ordinary with two exceptions: Ursula, with her dowager`s torso and octopus extremities, is an image of female villainy that could rank with the best of Disney`s wicked stepmothers, and in the Jiminy Cricket role as Ariel`s companion and conscience there is a nicely articulated crab named Sebastian (Samuel E. Wright). Sebastian speaks and sings with a lilting Jamaican accent, a charming touch until you realize that, in this apparently all-white underwater world, the only black character is distinctly subservient.
Still, Sebastian has the film`s one genuinely brilliant passage of animation, a ferocious (and highly un-Disney-like) confrontation with a French cook who wants to serve him for lunch. The film`s smooth if conservative movement patterns here make way for a frenzy of bounding, bouncing action and creative perspectives, giving the picture a shot of energy that sustains it through its slightly draw-out climax.
The hidden subject of ”The Little Mer maid” is a young woman`s discovery of her sexuality, and the feelings of guilt and regret (she must now leave her beloved Daddy) that it produces. All of the great Disney films have a similar subtext, and it is their way of drawing on universal growing pains
(and helping to imaginatively resolve them) that gives them their enduring, worldwide appeal. ”The Little Mermaid” does not cut as deeply or as darkly as some, yet there is enough real content in it to gain the recognition and adherence of a young audience. It may not be a transcendent masterpiece of the Disney canon, but ”The Little Mermaid” is still very heartening: It suggests the Disney magic isn`t lost after all.
”ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2
Directed by Don Bluth; co-directed by Dan Kuenster and Gary Goldman; written by David N. Weiss; production designed by Bluth and Larry Leker; edited by John K. Carr; music by Ralph Burns; produced by Bluth, Goldman and John Pomeroy. A United Artists release; opens Nov. 17 at the Chestnut Station, Webster Place and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:27. MPAA rating: G.
VOICE CAST
Itchy………………………………………….Dom De Luise
Charlie……………………………………….Burt Reynolds
Killer…………………………………Charles Nelson Reilly
Carface…………………………………………Vic Tayback
Whippet Angel……………………………………Melba Moore
Flo…………………………………………..Loni Anderson
”THE LITTLE MERMAID”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2
Directed and written by John Musker and Ron Clements; art direction by Michael A. Peraza Jr. and Donald A. Towns; edited by John Carnochan; music by Alan Menken; songs by Menken and Howard Ashman; produced by Ashman and Musker. A Walt Disney Pictures release; opens Nov. 17 at the McClurg Court and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:22. MPAA rating: G.
VOICE CAST
Louis……………………………………….Rene Auberjonois
Ariel……………………………………………Jodi Benson
Ursula…………………………………………..Pat Carroll
Scuttle………………………………………..Buddy Hackett
Triton………………………………………….Kenneth Mars
Sebastian……………………………………Samuel E. Wright