Waking Sleeping Beauty (U.S., 2009)
D: Don Hahn

In the mid-1980’s, Disney hit a new low: their latest animated film, The Black Cauldron, was beaten in its opening weekend box office by The Care Bears Movie.  The days of Walt were clearly gone.  Waking Sleeping Beauty, directed by Don Hahn (who produced The Lion King), tells the story of how Disney imploded and then rebuilt itself from the ground up, bringing in Hollywood big-hitters (namely Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg) for an image makeover that ultimately resulted in films like The Little Mermaid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Beauty & the Beast.  A warts-and-all portrait of some tense years, the film also makes it clear that not all was rosy when the cash machine was at its most lucrative: upon the release of The Lion King, the studio’s greatest success, Roy E. Disney, Eisner and Katzenberg were at each other’s throats, and on the verge of tearing the studio to pieces again.  This is where the film ends, surprisingly, although one expects a sequel should be equally dramatic (the fall of Eisner and the rise of Pixar).  Yet the primary focus of the film, directed and produced by men who were there, is the animation department and its struggles to remain creative and vital under leadership that was bringing the bottom line, and a dose of reality, to a Magic Kingdom on the verge of collapse.  Since the film consists entirely of vintage behind-the-scenes footage, there are some real gems here, such as a glimpse of Howard Ashman, quivering with nervous energy, demoing “Under the Sea” for the animation crew; a tense and bizarre moment in which Roy Disney and Eisner have a public clash at a memorial service; and the animators, cathartically working through their anxiety of losing their jobs, re-enacting Apocalypse Now in the animation studio.  Former Walt Disney chairman (and ex-Madisonian) Peter Schneider, who produced Waking Sleeping Beauty, was present for a Q&A following the screening, and explained how he was able to get Eisner, Katzenberg, and the late Roy E. Disney to contribute interviews for the film despite some initial reluctance and lingering bitterness.

A Town Called Panic (France, 2009)
D: Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar

Future midnight movie contender A Town Called Panic is a stop-motion animated film utilizing children’s toys and following a stream-of-consciousness narrative.  It’s like playing in a sandbox for 75 minutes, possibly after the ingestion of an illegal substance.  Horse, Cowboy, and Indian live together next to a farm, and when it’s Horse’s birthday, Cowboy and Indian decide to build him a brick barbeque – but they accidentally order too many bricks.  This triggers a series of events which grow increasingly surreal and absurd, and I won’t spoil any of it here.  True, it all goes on a bit too long, but that’s to be expected when padding this out to feature-length.  I will say that I was a bit worried to see so many children in attendance, as I was thinking this might move into Adult Swim territory pretty quickly; but the animators prefer a mixture of deadpan humor and whimsy - it’s more Spongebob at its strangest than anything on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  The kids will appreciate the childish logic, the adults will enjoy the non sequiturs, and the stoners, well, as soon as it’s out on DVD, the stoners will watch it nightly.

Shameless (Czech Republic, 2008)
D: Jan Hrebejk

Oskar, (Jirl Machacek) a television weatherman, is cheating on his wife Zuzana (Simona Babcakova), but otherwise puttering along just fine until he realizes, one day, that Zuzana has a very large nose.  (Why this never occurred to him before is a mystery, but part of the film’s droll humor.)  When he ineptly tries to suggest plastic surgery, she flies into a fit, and he’s shortly thrown out of the house.  He takes a job as a “safe transport” (a designated driver), mistreats his mistress’ pet turtle, and eventually begins another affair, this with a much older torch singer.  Meanwhile, Zuzana falls in love with a man trimming trees in the park.  Jan Hrebejk’s film is all about anecdotes, loosely strung together to represent Oskar’s aimlessness and borderline amorality.  It’s occasionally quite funny, but more often just melancholy, leading to a quite nice final image which manages to serve as a metaphor for the damaged state of almost all the film’s characters.  A slight film, to be sure, and one that I’ll probably remember only vaguely a year from now, but Shameless also manages a persistently light touch completely liberated from melodrama, reminiscent of the films of Hal Ashby, and that shouldn’t be undervalued.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden, 2009)
D: Niels Arden Oplev

The first of Stieg Larsson’s posthumous Millenium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has devoted fans all over the world, and the Saturday night Madison premiere of the film adaptation, at the Orpheum, was the Event of the film festival, completely sold out and packed to the rafters, which brought out a delighted Meg Hamel (or one of the festival director’s many clones, as she’s been everywhere this weekend): “I just wanted to see all of you,” she confessed.  She then admitted that when she decided to bring The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to WIFF, she wasn’t aware of its immense popularity.  But that popularity has only grown, and step into a bookstore now and you’ll find paperbacks of the first two books in the series, starring intensely likeable sleuths Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, stacked tall and in every corner.  So how was the film itself (says this writer who’s running out of blogging time and needs to get out the door to Sunday’s lineup of movies so let’s cut to the point already)?  Raw, intense, and I’m sure unbearably suspenseful to those who haven’t read the novel and don’t know what’s coming.  Then again, for those who have read the book, foreknowledge brings a different kind of dread, as there are some really tough scenes here.  It’s very, very, good, and certainly a key film in the current wave of Scandinavian thrillers.  The extraordinary running time (152 minutes) is due entirely to the complex plot Larsson has laid out, but fans know that director Niels Arden Oplev has also trimmed, cut, and refitted quite a bit, including, alas, much of journalist Blomkvist’s motivation for working on the missing person case for which aging industrialist Henrik Vanger has hired him, and an entire subplot involving Blomkvist’s Millenium magazine and its changing ownership.  I could write pages on the discrepancies, but it’s rather pointless.  What matters is that so much of the story, with its unusual characterizations and twists, is intact.  The film captures the chilliness and isolation of the book’s island setting, and the mystery – though compressed slightly – remains compelling.  The novel had a good deal of warmth, too, and I miss it; but what’s here is suitably cinematic and exciting, and, well, you know the Hitchcock quote which I included in the margin of this blog, as it always bears reminding:

“You probably know the story of the two goats who are eating up cans containing the reels of a film taken from a best seller. And one goat says to the other, ‘Personally, I prefer the book.’”