Happily Never After: Escaping the Small World (Part 1)

Escape from the most magical hell on Earth begins now.

The legacy of the direct to video continuations of the Disney Animated Cannon classics is one so infamous that you barely had to have watched any of them to grasp the reputation that had preceded them in terms of quality if you’re an animation fan.

Once you actually subject yourself to the highs and exponentially more numerous lows of the films themselves over extended periods of time however, the mind numbing irritations of lowest common denominator children’s entertainment attached to the hollowing disappointment of watching a legacy dragged through the mud, the sinking feelings of disgust and perverse fascination in seeing just how blatantly little effort a titan of the animation industry can get away with putting forth in a product so visible to the public at large, you start to go numb to the badness.

While that would typically be seen as some sort of good sign, when you’re mining such content for analysis and commentary on a case by case basis, the worst thing that could possibly happen is a string of movies that are all lazily bad in the exact same ways.

By any objective means, these movies are not quite the worst on their list but subjection to them in an almost consecutive fashion may represent the absolute lowest that this journey down the rabbit hole of the ugly side of Michael Eisner’s corporate legacy has ever taken me.

Films like “Return of Jafar” and “Belle’s New World” are so badly produced that they’re damn near hypnotic. Films like “Scamp’s Adventure” and “Pocahontas II” are so badly conceived that they’re almost fun to marvel at, contemplating how they got made much less greenlit. Films like “The Hunchback of Notre Dame II” are so much of all of the above times 20 that you’re left questioning worth of human existence on the planet.

These 3 films exist in a place that perhaps typify just how trashy 2000s Disney was getting; poorly conceived sequels to solid films that leave little in the way of sequel potential, while almost going out of their way to make you hate some of those movies’ most charming aspects. Unlike the lowest ring of quality presented by this line however, these film’s don’t even have the decency to fully embrace being the trash that they aspire to be because they actually underwent an evidently meticulous production that leaves them looking visually decent.

They are mind numbingly stupid and lazy pieces of trash that look decent and similar to the umpteenth big budget blockbuster attempting to start a franchise hocked by Hollywood every month, there’s only so many ways you can say it “looks okay but it sucks,” before you start to re think your life.

So strap yourselves in beloved readers, because for the next 2 weeks, we’re blasting through about 4 years of releases for a line of movies that does not deserve the energy and time individually focused breakdowns are sucking out of me.

Based on the Chinese legend of a great woman warrior, “Mulan” is something of an underappreciated classic of the Disney Renaissance that has truly begun to get its due in the last decade or so for its strong female protagonist whose seizure of her destiny in the name of protecting those that she loved won her the admiration of her nation at a time when women were not expected hold positions of substantial power.

Her defiance of gender norms in the face of irrational societal standards to protect her home and beloved family was endearing, empowering, and moving. So of course the way to follow that up is by inverting the values of Mulan’s accomplishments and motivations with irrational reasoning laden with unfortunate implications on the depiction of Chinese history in the name of… “girl power?” Maybe?

Her and her duty bound fiancé General Shaang return with a mission from the Emperor to escort his 3 zany daughters to arranged marriages with the Mongols for political stability, guarded along the way by the three wacky comic relief soldiers from the first film.

Does any further plot break down need to occur at this point? Are the stars of telegraphing not aligned with any more contrived clarity?

The problem isn’t even conceptual so much as it is execution. Arranged marriages are commonly seen as a problematic practice with good reason, especially from the perspective of a western lens where an element of choice involving courtship is usually always present. While there’s certainly plenty that can and should be said in critique of the practice, it seems to me that if you’re going to travel down that bold territory, you should probably at least have more to say about it than “it isn’t right.”

Compounding this problem is that you have a western animated production passing this judgment on an ancient Eastern civilization, problematic in so much as it enforces a cultural way upon a past civilization that it not only makes little effort to understand but unfolds its narrative in a way needlessly disrespectful to history in ways that weren’t necessary.

I’m not attempting to justify potentially problematic practices of an ancient foreign civilization mind you but if you’re not willing to tackle the fact that one adventure isn’t going to change an entire culture overnight, why would you choose to build your story around it?

This would be like if “Zootopia” ended with the revelation of its conspiracy shocking the populace into loving and respecting each other so much that Law Enforcement gets dissolved because conflict has gone extinct once and for all; why bother bringing up such a serious topic if the ending is “happily ever after, consequences be damned.”

What makes this beyond insufferable to the point of ire however, is that nobody seems to be unaware of how unfortunate it is. The Emperor addresses Mulan’s concerns saying it pains him to see this happen but the truce needs to be made for the benefit of the land’s security. The daughters lament that it has to be this way but have steeled themselves for their sacrifice knowing that it will prevent the horrors of war.

Political marriages can be problematic for the individuals involved in them but ultimately they’re done for reasons that may trump personal reward, which is not a matter of black and white as it is made out to be.

Yet the movie would have you believe that its hot head protagonist out to chase the path of the righteous and mow down anybody in her way is the same Mulan that was coolheaded and calculating enough to circumvent societal expectations without disrespecting protocol or chain of command.

It hurts at best and is horrendously dull at worst.

“Mulan II” may have been soulless, hackneyed, and downright unnecessary but to its credit, its source material left very little in the way of sequel potential to begin with. The best version of “Mulan II” very well may have been destined to still be bad.

“Tarzan II” doesn’t quite share that luxury. The original film was an acclaimed, bold and daring adventure film that ushered in an era of experimentation at Disney’s Animation Studio, based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a titan of serialized pulp science fiction fantasy. The approach taken to “Tarzan” may have deprioritized franchising but even if you cut out the swaths of “Tarzan” mythos that are uncomfortably dated, there was still an encyclopedia’s worth of material to pull from if you wanted to make a sequel.

By virtue of the storytelling legwork being more or less conceptually finished for them before production even began, I just can’t imagine how Disney seemed to find it easier to opt out of those ideas in favor of a fully disposable midquel following a child Tarzan amongst his ape family in a plot that feels as though it were being contrived together as the animators were sketching storyboards to gun through the project with as little thought as possible.

If prequels are seen as the first sign of desperation in franchise handling, midquels should be seen as the production equivalent of throwing in the towel. A prequel can still carry an air of mystery about itself with the foregone conclusions that they achieve adding some level of weight to the ensuing drama if done right.

Midquels are the worst of both worlds; narratively regressive and incapable of highlighting meaningful development because the most meaningful development its characters and story are supposed to go through can’t happen by mandate.

An ostracized child Tarzan desperate to win the favor of his adoptive father Kerchak and find his place amongst his herd is kind of fundamentally undermined by the fact that he’s not destined to earn any of this until his adult years by virtue of the previous film’s structure. The experience he has of learning in childhood without ever achieving this acceptance being fairly thin and nonessential information is clearly something that the filmmakers of the original were aware of because they were smart enough to cover those years in montage before the first half of the film ended.

The makers of “Tarzan II” unfortunately decide to push the limit on what qualifies for film status with a total fluff adventure featuring the titular hero bumbling with a crazy old ape voiced by the late George Carlin, borrowing the run away from your problems to run back to your problems page out of “The Lion King’s” playbook.

And again, the laziness can’t even aspire to be perversely hypnotic in its badness because the animators and voice directors put more effort and thought into making the final product that the people putting the words to page.

The workmanlike quality is somewhat admirable but serves to no effect as the nicest thing that I can say about “Tarzan II” is that it’s not the worst midquel of the direct to video sequel line (we’ll get to that soon enough).

Perhaps one of the few films of Disney’s post Renaissance age of experimentation widely considered to be solid, “The Emperor’s New Groove” has done the total opposite of David Spade’s career and has comedically withstood the test of time with a fair amount of grace.

Unfortunately in trying to jump on something for which audiences held a general fondness for franchising purposes, they made the mistake that has a history of failure under its belt regarding all genres of story; building a story around a popular comedic character optimized for the supporting cast.

“Kronk’s New Groove” follows the titular henchman of the previous film living his life as a cook, attempting to work his way up to purchasing a his own house in order to impress his disapproving father.

Despite the charms of veteran voice actor Patrick Warburton and a smattering of landed jokes that do at the very least place it above its colleagues in this very article, the movie suffers from a general lack of focus which impacts the things that can really be effectively done with the situational and fourth wall breaking humor.

Subplots drop in and out, characters enter and leave, and the only real thematic tie it all has is Kronk’s efforts to save money which comes together as a flimsy “wealth is in the people you love moral” that feels like an ending for ending’s sake as the movie decides it’s time for it to simply stop.

Ironically, unlike the other sequels, this actually could have worked if the scene to scene continuity stayed focused. Warburton’s loveable doofus portrayal of Kronk is remains so charming that he doesn’t really overstay his welcome and with a clearly defined sense of flow along with firmly establishing the state of his life, the movie could have been a charming little testament to the virtue of positivity in the vein of the modern “Paddington” movies.

As I ruminate on the film that could have been however, I find myself wondering if perhaps I should be more grateful that “Kronk’s New Groove” managed to allows some talent to shine through as opposed to the soul sucking ocean of corporate greed surrounding it.