A Young Man and His Vengeance

It's strange how Steve McQueen could seem like a wide-eyed innocent and a stone cold badass at the same time. In 1966's Nevada Smith, he plays a young man who sets out to methodically avenge the murder of his parents. His character provides a solid anchor for an engrossing western.

Max (McQueen) guilelessly gives directions to three men on horseback (Karl Malden, Martin Landau, and Arthur Kennedy), never guessing they plan on mutilating and murdering his parents. We catch a brief glimpse of how they skin his Kiowa mother alive but mostly what they do is left to our imagination.

Their excuse is they think Max's father has a secret stash of gold somewhere. How can this movie have a message about how vengeance is wrong? Well, it really doesn't. Max encounters a priest later in the film who firmly discourages Max from tracking down the final member of the trio but Max doesn't seem much impressed and neither would any viewer be.

At the same time, it's just the story of a young man setting out independently for the first time. He has the good fortune to run into a mentor, Jonas Cord (Brian Keith), who teaches him how to shoot with the sun in his eyes and advises him he'll need to get used to frequenting saloons and brothels to find the kind of men he's looking for. People warn him he'll turn into the same kind of man he's hunting but his heart is too steadfast for that.

Suzanne Pleshette has a small love interest role as a prostitute Max falls for when he's on a chain gang in a swamp. She likes him back but she doesn't understand his need for vengeance.

The end of the film is somewhat conflicted in its message but for the most part this is an unapologetic revenge fantasy. And it's oddly but agreeable cosy.

Twitter Sonnet #1527

The last equation fit the brilliant box.
Resourceful shoes advanced beyond the bank.
I asked a student late of purchased socks.
Despair beneath the valiant rider sank.
We quite the questions grown in marble black.
To tame a lion pocket, stitches cross.
Enduring sleep was dark within the sack.
Collected eyes behold a train of loss.
They didn't drink the stream when fast it ran.
The stranger guessed a creature near the gold.
His suit was six or seven kinds of tan.
The waiting wolf allows its hand to fold.
The fire bends across a dusty hull,
Careening inland, sailors stole a skull.

The Cow, Overexplained

Most people wouldn't like to see a cow's head when they looked in a mirror but it could have worse implications than they imagine. They could be mixed up in 2022's Ushikubimura ("Cow Head Village", 牛首村). Combining folk horror with the fatalism of a Carnival of Souls/Final Destination kind of movie, Ushikubimura starts out strong thanks to some creative trick shots and the charisma of its nineteen year old, first time lead, Kōki. About thirty minutes in, though, the story sadly gets bogged down in exposition and character drama is too much neglected.

We start off with a little found footage-style cinema with a trio of giggly teenage YouTubers exploring an abandoned building. To make things extra scary, one of them is wearing a cow's head. Their video becomes infamous when the girl with the cow's head gets stuck in an elevator and dies when the cable snaps.

The film cuts to some time later and we meet Kanon (Kōki), a charming young woman with really long hair (it never becomes relevant, I just thought I'd mention it because it always looks fantastic). Her not-quite-boyfriend, Ren (萩原利久), shows her video of the incident because it turns out the girl with the cow's head happens to look exactly like Kanon, fabulous long hair and all.

While the mystery about this persists, the film is at its strongest as Kanon goes about her life glimpsing ghosts at every turn. There are a lot of shots using reflections in pools, windows, and mirrors to show something off. One shot nicely uses heat distortion. Of course, Kanon and Ren end up having to explore the strange building themselves.

Eventually, they wind up in the Cow's Head Village of the title and things go downhill. There are long explanations about a cow god and a hereditary condition involving twins and human sacrifice. It's a good premise but the film would've been better off allowing us to piece together the information through visuals than to have it explained to us. There are also too many scenes where we get a direct explanation for what a ghost is doing and why. The film starts to feel like an instruction manual. What's worse is that Kanon never gets much depth. If the movie is going to talk about family curses and blood ties, it ought to have given Kanon some personal drama she might start imagining is connected to the supernatural events. Like Fred Madison in Lost Highway or Detective Howe in The Wicker Man, I wished to see some kind of reflection of the horror in the personality of the protagonist. Sadly, Kanon, and her twin, Shion (also Koki), never amount to more than being just a pretty face. Or a pair of pretty faces. She does give a decent performance. I wish her better luck in her next role.

Ushikubimura is currently in theatres in Japan.

Squash Debate

This is the latest comic I made for students. It's the first one I made for third year, 15 year old, students. I was surprised to find they were a little more reluctant to do it than the first and second year students. I guess hormones are starting to make them too cool for this kind of thing.

A few of them did produce some interesting things, once I explained what a squash is. For the third panel, one student wrote, "This is God's food!"

Third year students are supposed to be learning how to debate, a difficult thing to introduce into Japanese culture. Many of the teachers are also reluctant to broach the subject. I thought this might be a fun, very unconfrontational way to at least get them used to some of the language of debate. I was glad some of the students took to it. I had help from one student whom I regularly have long conversations with about horror movies. I tend to have one or two favourite students in every classroom who seem to appoint themselves my lieutenants and who go about making sure people stay on task.

The students finally prevailed upon me to come up with example dialogue so this is what I came up with on the spot.

1. "Eggplants are great!"

2. "An eggplant is like a baby."

3. "And like a king!"

4. "But eggplants are smaller than pumpkins."

5. "Shouldn't the pumpkin be king?"

6. "That's right!"

7. "Eggplants are too small!"

8. "Pumpkins are fat."

9. "You're a bad man!"

10. "Eeeeeuauuugh!"

Red Pages

Another box of my old books arrived a few days ago, this one a very small box containing just a few of my Caitlin R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, and Neil Gaiman books as well as a book about Dahomey. There were also fragments of another box in the box as well as a stamp indicated the item had been received in a damaged state in Nevada. I suspect the original box somehow fell apart and my books were scattered. I also suspect some of my books were lost considering I received only about twenty pages of Caitlin's Low Red Moon. I remember that book fell apart while I was reading it but I'd had it carefully packed between a couple other books. Who knows when I'll ever know what books I lost? I kept no record of what books went in what box.

Anyway, speaking of Caitlin R. Kiernan, I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day, containing a portion of a novella she'd started a few years ago. It's about the world after a plague has devastated the planet, doing something sinister to human women that somehow prevents or distorts natural birth. It's an interesting story brought to life with Caitlin's colourful use a colloquial fantasy dialect. It begins with a bit of rumination on the Garden of Eden, the sort of thing I'm always bound to find interesting after years of studying Milton.

It's supposed to finally be a bit warmer here to-day in Kashihara, Japan, so I think I might go for a walk. Here's a little sign of spring I spotted a few days ago:

Twitter Sonnet #1526

As fish, we drank the water fast and full.
But now the desert sells a house for song.
So mix an apple, big and sauced and cool.
The core is short but who's-your-friends're long.
The swinging bat's a quiet switch to wind.
Before the shaking pitcher, mitts were cold.
The score to-day has edged around the bend.
Before the second inning, hope was old.
A certain time restricts the sacred wrist.
The arm's distraction fit the panty bill.
Explain to vapour all the air you missed.
We stuffed a day's supply beneath the gill.
The scattered pages rode Pacific winds.
Across the marsh, a sickly lantern wends.

Managing the Human Heart

Is zealotry one of life's inevitabilities? I got to thinking about this last night when Putin's invasion of the Ukraine apparently happened while I was watching a 2019 movie called Koshien, a documentary about the biannual high school baseball tournament in Japan. It's a decent documentary.

I never really got professional sports. Sometimes I could watch a football or baseball game and get caught up in the drama of the contest, or be impressed by a physical achievement. But the idea of shedding tears, of putting in the kind of dedication required to play on a professional level, holds no glamour or appeal for me. I saw a video by Jordan Peterson a few months ago where he talked about how people sublimate their natural competitive instincts into professional sports and I guess I can see the utility.

Watching the Japanese students weeping because they're cut from a team or enduring harsh rebukes from their coach just for being slightly underweight, I remembered watching Japan's Longest Day, the movie about Japan at the end of World War II I watched a few months ago. It's that same zeal with which many in the Japanese military couldn't face the concept of surrender that these kids show when dealing with a tournament loss. And, again, I can see the value. But the parameters set by the rules of baseball just aren't enough to fire my imagination, I guess.

I work at junior high schools in Japan where I can already see the kind of dedication and fervour visible in the high school students in this documentary. They get into their full uniforms every day and I watch them jogging around the field in perfect formation in the afternoon. I compare that to my dim memories of Little League, when the kids practiced in jeans. Sometimes I used to sit in the outfield and pick flowers. Yeah, I was never cut out for it.

A lot of the kids ask me about Shohei Ohtani, the player for the Los Angeles Angels who's breaking records. Considering the lifelong, religious dedication these kids put into the sport, it's only a wonder they don't produce 20 Ohtanis a year. But that is a point, isn't it? Ohtani's high school coach is interviewed in the film and he deflects taking any responsibility for making Ohtani what he is to-day, saying Ohtani already had his unique spirit when he met him. Maybe the guy's being modest but one also has to wonder why the U.S. usually produces better players with a less grueling system. The kids at the schools where I work still regularly tell me their dream is to play in or at least personally witness games in the U.S.

Koshien: Japan's Field of Dreams is available on The Criterion Channel.

Wars of Ink and Drinks

Somewhere in a squirming tide of nighttime neurotics, two despised men wage an interminable contest for control of the elusively defined everything. 1957's Sweet Smell of Success is a gorgeously shot noir of New York. Director Alexander Mackendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe create a world of busy streets and claustrophobic nightclubs crammed with anxious souls. Stewing in this pot we find Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis as a gossip columnist and a press agent, respectively. The screenplay for this film is highly regarded but I found it to be by far the weakest element. Nonetheless, there's plenty to admire here.

Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, a man who can make or break anyone in the entertainment industry with his newspaper column. But in this story, he's primarily interested in making sure his sister (Susan Harrison) stops dating a jazz musician called Steve Dallas (Martin Milner).

Readers of columns like Hunsecker's don't hear anything about this. They do hear about Steve, they also hear about the people Sidney Falco (Curtis) represents, never guessing what truly motivates the claims presented in print. Or so we're meant to assume. My main problem with this film is that Hunsecker and Falco are presented as these relentless spin doctors who maliciously manufacture impressions but we never actually see them convince anyone of anything. No-one trusts them, ever, except Falco manages to trick an aged comedian in one scene, though he doesn't seem to notice his success.

The frustrating thing is how improbable Falco and Hunsecker's failures are. When Falco tries to blackmail a man who cheated on his wife with a cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols), the man decides to take that moment to come clean with his wife. When Hunsecker swoops in to rescue Dallas from another columnist's smear, both Dallas and Hunsecker's sister seem to see through the whole thing immediately. All this makes the film seem less like a realistic examination of the crooked souls crafting fraudulent narratives and more like the depiction of two men trapped in some kind of ironic, Twilight Zone-ish hell. Presented for your approval, two professional liars caught in a nightmare where no-one believes them.

So it's not so much a depiction of two scary men. It just feels like two people busy at hating themselves and all the characters around them are really their own demons, dragging them down. If you look at it that way, it's a pretty handsome damnation.

Sweet Smell of Success is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Ruling Girls

Now I may as well rank Disney Princesses. For this list, I'm including all main characters from Disney Animated Studios films who are officially recognised as Princesses at some point in their movies. I'm not including characters from Pixar movies (no Merida) or characters who essentially function as Princesses in their films without having the title (no Maid Marian). Disney's own rules for who qualifies as an official Disney Princess don't make much sense to me. Why is Mulan included when she neither has the title in her film nor even behaves in any way suggestive of being a princess? And, yet, Anna and Elsa from Frozen, despite being the daughters of a king and being very popular, are not included in the official Disney roster of princesses. So, nuts to those rules. Here are the real McCoys:

17. Ellonwy

Sorry, Ellonwy. You're poorly written, animated like a possessed wicker doll, and you look too much like Aurora.

16. Moana

Moana is cute but her motivations are as poorly conceived as everything else in her film.

15. Belle

We're told Belle likes adventure and books and these two aspects of her personality don't really drive her character in any way in the film's story. Yes, she's excited to see a library in Beast's castle, but she never calls to mind any piece of knowledge from the books she's read. We don't really see the effect of being well read on her character.

14. Tiger Lily

We don't learn much about Tiger Lily but she's pretty cute.

13. Tiana

I liked Tiana's introduction and her motivations early in the film. Sadly, she's stuck in frog form for most of the story and she doesn't have much chemistry with the prince.

12. Rapunzel

She's beautifully designed and animated. It's hard not to be captivated watching her and her hair move. It almost distracts from her kind of obnoxious personality.

11. Anna

She's a sweetheart and sometimes her dippiness is funny, too.

10. Raya

Here's a princess who really does seem to relish adventure. If her film were better written, she'd be a lot higher on this list.

9. Kida

Disney's first black princess, Kida somehow seems to have become largely forgotten. She doesn't appear until two thirds through her film and she's basically Pocahontas redux but her design is nice and she's well animated.

8. Vanellope von Schweetz

The second Wreck-It Ralph spent a lot of time arguing that Vanellope qualifies as a Disney Princess--and then she didn't become an official Disney Princess. Well, she is in my book. This was a case of a voice actress, Sarah Silverman, being perfectly united with an animated character. No-one else could have done her mixture of sweet and puerile in quite the same way.

7. Aurora

She doesn't get a lot of screen time and only one scene of dialogue but she works brilliantly as a physical presence. "Once Upon a Dream" is also one of the greatest Princess songs.

6. Snow White

A wonder of animation and a convincing sweetheart.

5. Jasmine

She has great chemistry with Aladdin and a sexy outfit. And there's just something about a girl with a tiger, isn't there?

4. Pocahontas

Whenever Glen Keane animated a Princess, you could rely on her being sexy, but he took Pocahontas to another level. The physical sweetness of Pocahontas remains a scandal to this day and, for that, I honour her name.

3. Cinderella

I gained a lot of respect for Cinderella in my recent viewing. No other Princess so pragmatically gets her life in order. She's the Machiavelli of Disney Princesses.

2. Ariel

Glen Keane's masterpiece and the key component of the whole resurrection of the Disney company. The "Part of Your World" sequence is a perfect piece of cinema with animation, design, songwriting, and vocals all getting top marks. And then there's her antics on the beach.

1. Elsa

It's a close call, but I'm giving Elsa the edge. Like Ariel, the first part of her film is by far her best, but, oh, how great that first part is. Beautifully designed with an incomparable performance from Idina Menzel, Elsa's emergence from her family's repression is glorious in a way everyone can identify with, even toddlers, somehow.

Twitter Sonnet #1525

Another list condemns the stone to weight.
A meal was spinning since the 80s' end.
The wiggling worm was more than gummy bait.
A house defined in curves was called a bend.
A Telly builds a row of vacant husks.
A model eye rebounds from candle wax.
A grinning man escaped with missing tusks.
The people clad in green were ever taxed.
As slumber hit the dragon, dawn arose.
Retired clouds were hiding stars of ice.
We told the fairy child tips for pros.
If lessons fade, you have to teach them twice.
A measured step was length and breadth a swim.
The diamond lights began to flicker dim.

The Labyrinthine House in the Labyrinthine City

Tourists should take care not to get lost in a strange city. You could run into the Devil himself, as Lisa did in 1974's Lisa and the Devil (Lisa e il diavolo). At least she was lucky enough for Satan to be played by Telly Savalas and even luckier for the director to be Mario Bava. So it's a beautiful film, even if it is nonsensical and sadly loses track of its own protagonist despite the fact that she's played by the lovely Elke Sommer.

She's part of a group of tourists in Toledo viewing a mural depicting Satan at the beginning of the film. She wanders off and spots Leandro (Savalas), who happens to look just like the painted Devil.

One of the best parts of the film follows as Lisa finds herself suddenly wandering endless, empty, unrecognisable streets in the old Spanish city. Finally, she ends up at a mansion where the bulk of the movie is set. It's inhabited by a countess (Alida Valli) and her handsome son, Maximilian (Alessio Orano). From here on, the movie becomes primarily about him and his derangement. The Devil, meanwhile, is the butler.

There are also two other guests, one of whom is played by the always ravishing Sylva Koscina. I wish she were more prominently featured in the film but she tears through a rapid, bloody subplot.

Dramatic things seem to happen in the mansion without ever quite pulling together into a cohesive whole. There's something about ghosts, something about possessed dummies, and, of course, the Devil is mischievously up to . . . something. It's all beautifully shot and of course Bava was a fountain of great composition ideas.

Lisa and the Devil is available on Shudder.

Bonus Ghosts

A comedian attempts to kickstart his career by staying in haunted apartments in 2020's Stigmatised Properties (事故物件). This is the part where I might say, "He gets more than he bargains for," but he doesn't, really. He went to the places knowing they were haunted and, sure enough, they were. The film begins with kind of an interesting tone and the leads are cute but ultimately Stigmatised Properties feels too rote and artificial to generate any sense of life.

The film begins with Yamame (Kazuya Kamenashi) and his partner, Nakai (Koji Seto), performing an oddly vaudevillian routine with an umbrella.

Yamame is in drag and the whole audience is stone faced and motionless, which is really odd for a Japanese audience. I'd expect some courtesy applause. It's the first of many artificial moments designed to move the plot forward.

The only person in the audience who laughs is a young woman named Azusa (Nao Honda) who, it turns out, is such a fan of the duo, she has a little shrine of them at home. She's thrilled when Yamame gives her the umbrella used in the act.

This is intriguing and a bit creepy but it's never followed up on. But Honda is one of the best parts of the film. She's cute and I really like her plaid overcoat.

This movie is initially set in Osaka, which was fun for me to see so many familiar locations. A lot of it also takes place in Kyoto. In the final act, Yamame travels to Tokyo, away from his two friends, but both of them show up with melodramatic timing anyway. That's just one of the things that deflates the climax.

The movie's filled with cheap jump scares but once ghosts start sticking around for more than two seconds they rapidly lose their punch, mostly because director Hideo Nakata can't manage to authentically explore the emotions of such a situation. Yamame is supposedly living in these apartments but we never see him struggling to sleep after a ghost encounter. It's like everyone knows the ghosts will only come on cue.

Stigmatised Properties is available on Netflix in Japan.

The Disney Sixty

As you may have noticed, yesterday I finally finished my survey of the Disney Animated Canon. So naturally, to-day I have to rank all the movies. First, I thought I'd comment on the Canon as a whole.

Obviously, the preoccupations present in Disney films have changed over time as their creators changed and the company's philosophy changed. Earlier films placed a greater emphasis on personal responsibility and achievement while, in recent decades, the emphasis is more on personal validation. The intrinsic value of community and family has remained a mostly consistent theme, though, from Snow White to Encanto. These things stand out but there are a few other interesting, less obvious, recurring ideas I noticed.

Sex

Yeah, it's there. Many people comment on romance in Disney films but there's plenty of pure, carnal pleasure in evidence. There are the sexy fairies in Fantasia and the seductive Slue-Foot Sue in Melody Time. But sex in Disney movies wasn't just about titillating the audience--sexual attraction as a motivation integral to the plot is frequently present in the first decades of the canon. Donald Duck and his comrades indulge in unbridled hedonistic pleasure in The Three Caballeros, chasing Carmen Miranda's sister and Mexican women on the beach as they sow their wild oats in foreign lands. Ichabod Crane in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is a man of carnal appetite whose lust for Katrina Van Tassel is tied to his greed and gluttony. In Peter Pan, Tinkerbell functions as a symbol of easy, adolescent, sexual gratification as opposed to the potential family symbolised by Wendy. In Lady and the Tramp, it's heavily implied that the two lead dogs have a sexual encounter in the park that leaves Lady ashamed to awaken alone. Curiously, while the 1960s sexually liberated most of the western world, it marked a time when Disney became more reluctant to explore sexuality. It wasn't until the late '80s that sex became part of the story again and, unsurprisingly, it coincided with the company's legendary Renaissance. After the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the company was willing to be titillating again and sexually appealing character designs enhanced The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Pocahontas. However, the stories were less sophisticated in how they commented on the sexuality apparent in the animation. Only The Hunchback of Notre Dame really attempted to approach it but that movie is generally, quite rightly, regarded as an ambitious failure. As American society now has grown increasingly wary of physical intimacy, sexuality has become noticeably less prominent in Disney films.

The Unnaturalness of Sexually Attractive Older Women

This is a strange preoccupation that has cropped up repeatedly throughout the history of the canon, starting with the evil queen in Snow White whose compulsion to be as sexually desirable as her adoptive daughter is shown to be deeply, destructively unnatural. Cruella De Vil's attempts to look sexually glamorous are connected with a compulsion to kill puppies--like the Queen in Snow White, being beautiful herself involves murdering the young. Ursula tries to take Ariel's place in The Little Mermaid and the most egregious example occurs somewhat anachronistically in Tangled in which Rapunzel's stepmother has a desire to appear young that is presented as obviously sick. What is this preoccupation? It could have something to do with the importance placed on family so, therefore, any attempt by one component of a family to redefine their role might be seen as a threat.

Beauty

Some would say beauty is entirely subjective. To some extent, that's true, but there's a consistent universal appeal in youthful, symmetrical features. The reality of beauty can be seen in its constant influence on society at all levels. Naturally, it's unavoidable for Disney and though occasionally their movies present a story like Hunchback of Notre Dame or Beauty and the Beast, seemingly intent on presenting a story about how true love transcends physical appearances, every time, Disney films reinforce the value of physical beauty (Esmeralda does not reciprocate Quasimodo's feelings and the Beast is transformed into a handsome gentleman). In the process, Disney has given us some of the most gorgeous characters ever to grace celluloid or digital.

Management/Entrepreneurship

Walt Disney's belief in capitalism is certainly reflected in his films and in the first decades there was plenty about personal responsibility and the need to eschew short term pleasures. Cinderella is really a story about a girl who uses her difficult upbringing to learn how to be a queen while, a year before, Ichabod Crane was also seen trying to improve his economic standing through marriage (less successfully). Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Sleeping Beauty all present examples of leadership--showing the benefits of good leadership and the dangers of bad leadership.

Romance

There's a lot less romance in Disney than you'd think. After Snow White, it cropped up memorably in the anthology films but only as vignettes, until Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The complicated dynamic between Ichabod, Brom Bones, and Katrina is left more or less in tact from the original story but actually isn't terribly romantic. Since the Prince is barely in Snow White, I'd say it wasn't until Lady and the Tramp that we got a proper, two sided affair with two three dimensional characters. And after Lady and the Tramp, we wouldn't get it again until Robin Hood. Sadly, both The Rescuers and The Aristocats lobotomise their female leads and the teens in The Black Cauldron seem like they were written by robots. I wouldn't even say The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast are particularly strong in the romance department (Prince Eric never really progresses past a masturbatory fantasy for Ariel). Aladdin has a genuine chemistry between its leads and then . . . That's it. Tarzan and Atlantis both have lopsided pairings with only one fleshed out character and Tangled's preoccupation with conformity stifles its romance. The only romance that's really worked in recent years is the one in Zootopia--which the characters never acknowledge. It kind of makes sense, though, because prepubescent kids, even girls, aren't especially interested in relationships beyond a superficial level.

Children

Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi are three of the best movies about children in the history of cinema. After that, though, children don't make frequent appearances in Disney films. Ironically, the kids in Peter Pan seem more like teenagers, as does Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Winnie the Pooh had some fantastic childlike characters but the child characters in the '80s films--Fox and the Hound, The Great Mouse Detective, and Oliver and Company, are pretty weak, as are the kids in the two Rescuers movies. But that makes sense. Kids like to fantasise about being adults.

Parenthood

The 1960s found Disney releasing a string of films centred on parental figures--Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmations, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats. I suspect this was likely due to the filmmakers' preoccupations with their own roles as parents at the time. Family, though, is a big concern throughout the canon, whether it's a found family, like in Snow White, or biological family. There is an underlying bias towards biological families sometimes, particularly considering the recurrence of evil stepmothers, but I suspect this is more of a hand-me-down detail from the source materials. Found families are positively portrayed again and again--in Pinocchio, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, Oliver and Company, Home on the Range, Bolt, Wreck-It Ralph, and Big Hero 6. And that goes hand and hand with . . .

Community

Again and again, the importance of community is emphasised by Disney movies. If a movie doesn't end with family coming together, it ends with community coming together. Sometimes to the detriment of the story, so committed is Disney to this ideal. The only Disney movie in which we really get any inkling of a dark side to community is Ichabod and Mr. Toad. This was once again due to Disney being extraordinarily faithful to the source material. Ichabod Crane remains the only character in the Disney canon who's punished in the end for being an outsider, even if he is a charming one.

Class

This is one big difference between old Disney and new. During Walt Disney's lifetime, economic and social class were frequently a part of the characters and their stories. You can see it in Snow White, Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and obviously in Lady and the Tramp. And then you see it after Disney's death in The Aristocats, The Rescuers, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective and, of course, in Oliver and Company. But after that, it's rarely a factor, with the notable exception of Aladdin. Disney's not alone in its decreased class consciousness as Hollywood in general has been less and less conscious of economic disparity over the past thirty years.

Anyway, here's my ranking:

60. Dinosaur
59. Chicken Little
58. Winnie the Pooh (2011)
57. Meet the Robinsons
56. Home on the Range
55. The Emperor's New Groove
54. Moana
53. Treasure Planet
52. The Princess and the Frog
51. Bolt

50. Big Hero 6
49. Fun and Fancy Free
48. The Aristocats
47. The Rescuers Down Under
46. Hercules
45. Mulan
44. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
43. Tangled
42. Ralph Breaks the Internet
41. Raya and the Last Dragon

40. Encanto
39. The Sword in the Stone
38. Fantasia 2000
37. The Fox and the Hound
36. The Black Cauldron
35. Tarzan
34. Brother Bear
33. The Great Mouse Detective
32. The Rescuers
31. 101 Dalmatians

30. Frozen II
29. Pocahontas
28. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
27. Robin Hood
26. Beauty and the Beast
25. The Lion King
24. The Jungle Book
23. Lady and the Tramp
22. Oliver & Company
21. Lilo and Stitch

20. Wreck-It Ralph
19. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
18. Make Mine Music
17. Zootopia
16. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
15. Bambi
14. Melody Time
13. The Three Caballeros
12. Saludos Amigos
11. Aladdin

10. Peter Pan
9. Fantasia
8. Frozen
7. Cinderella
6. The Little Mermaid
5. Sleeping Beauty
4. Alice in Wonderland
3. Dumbo
2. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
1. Pinocchio

Twitter Sonnet #1524

The tea's important nights conclude at eight.
Excited voices fail to frazzle weeds.
A trillion blimps could lift the planet's weight.
The line divides the clueless food from feeds.
With timing blank as paper faces start.
We never dreamed of dripping bags for life.
Arrange to cook the callous, broken heart.
The shade is cool but not a living wife.
A special hat was worn to shield the track.
Reducing picture size, we carried film.
Avoid the Atlas job to spare your back.
The candy necklace never broke the helm.
The pencils change to plastic autumn leaves.
The book forever gains increasing leaves.