PopFilter Vs Our Childhood

In which we reminisce about childhood entertainment, then go back and watch it and re-assess.

RYAN HALEY

VS

AN AMERICAN TAIL

When you’re a kid, you’re an idiot. You’re an idiot in almost every conceivable way, but none more evident than your opinions on pop culture. As a kid, I was an animation junkie. No — animation seems more like an adult word. I wasn’t flipping through channels (remember that?) looking for Bill Plympton or Akira. I was looking for anything that had an explosion or a talking animal. Who had time for the limitations on imagination that live action had to offer?  It didn’t matter to me what it was, as long it was a cartoon, and all cartoons were exactly the same. So why was I an idiot? Because this means I put Dumbo, Pinnochio, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in the same category as An American Tail.

 

Before watching An American Tail for the first time since the eighties, I’m already not expecting much. As kids, we all were bad at deciphering the quality from the crap. Luckily, we have time, which usually does a pretty good job at putting great things on a pedestal and forcing us to forget the garbage. When was the last time you thought about, or heard someone mention, An American Tail? Sure, there’s no theme parks or direct-to-video sequels that are keeping it in the public eye, but I really don’t think that The Lion King would have ever needed Disneyland parades in order to be still popular to this day. It’s not something that kids are clamoring for, and it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that parents are making sure their kids get a look at. It’s lost to the ages, important to a very select age group of people, a very nostalgic age group that has somehow overlooked cramming the internet with pictures and comments regarding this movie, something that does not bode well for it.

 

AN AMERICAN TAIL

** (out of ****)

INTERMISSION

For all the shit it takes, Disney has pumped a lot of time, energy, and money into its “Classic” series over the years. To prove this to yourself, you could re-watch the movies I listed above, or you can just spend a few minutes re-visiting An American Tail, which is essentially the movie version of Two-Buck Chuck, a wine designed only for the dumbest of wine drinkers. The first thing you notice is the animation, which looks about as good as it should have if it was a TV show in 1986, not a feature film with a major release. Every shortcut available is taken, and that can be said for just about everything in the movie. I’m not gonna shit on it for its story structure — mouse loses family, mouse finds family (spoiler) — because then I would have to shit on anything written for kids. That’s not my problem here. It’s that with every method of delivery of said story, you can feel the filmmakers saying “Fuck it. Kids are idiots.”

 

“If you have a hook, the rest of the song writes itself.” I guess that’s true, producers, if you’re writing a shitty dance song that really just needs to get people to dance. A little more imagination for the songs in your MUSICAL might be nice, though. Let’s take a look at the song “There Are No Cats in America,” a song whose chorus I could remember in its entirety before I watched it, but not a single other thing about it, which now comes as no surprise. The chorus is a rousing, full-chorus sing-along, featuring every mouse on a boat, singing about what the American Dream means to a rodent. Cool. Then we get the verses, in which an incredibly ethnically stereotyped mouse steps up to sing a solo about just how fucking disgustingly ethnic they are. It’s not so racist it’s offensive, but it is so tired and boring it’s offensive. By the way kids, the Irish are drunks and the Italians are mean drunks. Thanks for the lesson, An American Tail. This song roughly takes up about 60 percent of AAT’s 48 minute run time, so you really do get to see every nation on the planet. Wondering what Dutch mice are like? They are drunk.

 

“Kids just want a baby mouse they can squeeze and fuck.” If you remember the movie fondly, it’s most likely because of how adorable main character Fievel is, and I assure you, this is incredibly intentional. Every single second that he is on camera, he is shitting cuteness all over the screen. It’s surprising that they didn’t put an “AWWWWW” track in this movie, so reliant are they on Fievel’s giant eyes and constant cooing. They even give him a giant hat and shirt, giving an adorable edge to his disgusting hobo chic. All of this isn’t unheard of for an animated feature, but when you realize how much they’re depending on it, it gives it that much more of an air of manipulation.

 

“Make it 80 minutes. Those retarded shitheads won’t even notice how short it is.” Actually, thanks for this one, producers.

 

I enjoy when people say that they miss the way things used to be made.” An American Tail? I wish they still made cartoons like that?” Why? Because the eye-popping animation and pitch-perfect storytelling of Toy Story 3 is just too much for your nutsack-filled brain to handle? Maybe, but more often than not, it’s probably because they’re filled by nostalgia, an epidemic that wipes away intelligence and replaces it with an idealized version of what life could have been if you didn’t get pregnant in middle school. If you’re not sure which one it is for you, show this to the kid that you’re only 12 years older than. Odds are that, upon finishing the movie, he or she will calmly stand-up, find a mouse somewhere, and smash its head in, just in the off-chance he or she will be forced to watch that mouse’s fucking banal adventures someday as well. If this happens, you can blame it on how terrible the cartoons are that they have to watch, as opposed to how great they were when you were a kid.

 

-Ryan Haley