movie

[egypturnash]

I just got back from seeing "Sweatbox" with the Spümcø crew. It's an extremely limited engagement, just up for a week or so to make it eligible for Oscar consideration.

If you can see it, do.

It is a documentary about the making of 'The Emperor's New Groove'; more precisely, it is a documentary of how it became such a horrible piece of tripe. Why? Oh, come on, guess. Executives.

This presents a very uncomplimentary picture of the heads of Disney feature. It's horrible to watch them lisp their way through justifications of what happened to 'Empire of the Sun'. (Unless you are so flamingly gay that everything around you spontaneously turns pink or rainbow, certain people in this movie will make you feel like a complete and total het. I'd heard Disney was a super-queer shop but I'd never seen it for myself.) And embarrassing to watch the ex-director say that 'well, what they did made a better film; sure, it hurts, but you move on' when a part of him just wants to stalk the halls of management with a machine gun.



I can't shake this worry that someday, I may be eligible for a starring role in a documentary like this. And not as an executive.

[ addendum: I am curious as to how much of nowhere the original movie may have been going. Perhaps the executives really did pull victory from the jaws of defeat with the transformation of EotS to ENG. Any artist actually involved in the business of creating animated cartoons tends to end up seeing the executives as The Enemy, forcing us to compromise our vision for the needs of Happy Meal tie-in deals. But some of the things that were said near the end of 'Sweatbox' make me reluctant to try and see their side. ]

Comments

[dustmeat.livejournal.com]

uh...I loved the Emperors New Groove

[dour.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Me too. It was one of the best movies Disney's come out with in a good long while, especially previous to Lilo and Stitch.

I'm sure that Empire of the Sun would have also been fantastic, and in a completely different way. It'd be kind of nice, really, if they just made both... but I suppose there was probably just a little too much crossover.

Shame. But life goes on. Better to make the next one shine, than to complain about how the last one could have.

There's two things to be said here...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...and it's likely they may seem conflicting.

Emperor's New Groove was a surprisingly well-timed, comedic romp. It was a roll-back to laughter I hadn't experienced since the original Aladdin with it's Genie, or to a semi-unrelated example, the original Short Circuit.

Empire of the Sun on the other hand, would have been different, perhaps nostalgic excursion, much like the original Mysterious Cities of Gold series, for anyone that remembers it.

I throughly enjoyed Groove, but that doesn't make me miss seeing Empire any less. Nor, does it make me despise any less some of the crackpot decisions that trundled along in the course between the two films either.

[jonasbagel.livejournal.com]

*LOL*

Oh, I have to see this. I have to. :D Where's it playing?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

We saw it at the theatre in the Beverly Center. Check papers, and hurry; it will vanish very soon - possibly before this weekend.

[mandrill.livejournal.com]

http://news.awn.com/index.php3?newsitem_no=7425

I'd love to see this film and can only hope it may eventually be shown on cable.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I liked "New Groove." I thought it was funny, which is something Disney seems to neglect too darn often.

And as for your worries... check me out on this, both of us have this ideal that it's far better to be producing art somewhere, even if it's for a completely shitty production, than it is to be shovelling burgers or data entry or whatever, eh?

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

I liked the Emperor's New Groove.

One of the animators who worked on it when it was Empire of the Sun hated the experience. There was mismanagement, and no clear story idea. The details of his experience gave me the impression that Empire was a "it sounded good at the time" project, where everyone who was involved in the inception abandonned for flashier things, leaving the disinterested to finish it without a vision. From all signs, it wasn't going to work as originally conceived. It was diving for the bottom faster than The Black Cauldron.

Empire of the Sun? Empire in the Sun? Empire Strikes Back?

[drakegrey.livejournal.com]

I shall add my voice to the chorus...

A friend, who worked on EotS/ENG in their HR group, did say that the original storyline was goldplated to death and a figurative Gordian Knot of ideas. It had prince meets girl, AND prince and pauper twins, AND turned-into-a-llama AND evil wizardess AND and and and and. It seemed to me, when she told me about it back when it was EotS that basically Disney took every idea that ever worked in every movie since Pinoccio and just tossed it in the pot.

And don't even start me on all the confusion we had over 'Empire IN the Sun' vs. 'Empire OF the Sun'. I think it flipflopped about 1,000,000 times. :P

--Drake

[immortalpain.livejournal.com]

(Back to bug!) - I recall reading somewhere that while EoTS was.. well.. as drakegrey said, a mishmash of all the ideas, it was also supposed to be pretty serious. This is well, rumors and such but in a way it was interesting to see how it came out.

ENG Had some truly hillarious moments and it was so wildly different from most Disney movies at the time I couldn't help but like it - Many people consider Disney to be going down the hole but they are also coming up with some wildly different ideas for movies then what they have done previously, although not all of them have been that good. It's got me genuinely interested to see what will be popping up in the near future.