So when I sat down to watch this, it’d been many a year since I’d actually seen the film. I was immediately struck by the fact that the villain was unmistakably Christopher Lloyd, and I somehow didn’t know this fact. Clearly my memory and insights will be impeccable for this outing.
Indeed, on that note… a lot of this is building on a series of tweets I did a couple weeks ago. All told there’s not a lot here that I found, but I also hate to let the blog go more than a month without some sort of content, so best follow through and assemble all that into something resembling thoughts.
Okay so most of the first half of the movie is a solid archeology run, followed by… some of the 90sest content I can think of. The Genie is trying his damnedest to talk like the cool kids and make him some catch phrases to land. Actually maybe that’s more 80s cartoon sensibilities. Anyways, the issue is that nothing about it is really attention grabbing, save some neat creature designs and one or two animation errors (we’ll come back to some of that stuff). They want to establish that Scrooge feels he earned the treasure, that Genie is a deeply unhappy person (and also, well, a person), and that the kids are quickly invested in his well-being, and just kinda put it out there.
Actually, the other thing of substance is that the wishes that go on are almost always twisted, despite Genie seemingly being benevolent and obedient to a fault. Webby’s wishes for a pet and living toys are so destructive they have to be unwished, and a simple wish for ice cream still ends in Dewey having some land on his head.
Second part is mostly entertaining for the creature designs, or more specifically Merlock’s animal forms. Beetle aside they’ve got a good mix of clearly being Merlock while also clearly being the animal they are, and the carry over of color and hair elements really sells the thing. He also gets beaten up pretty thoroughly, which is nice since his demise isn’t especially potent. The finale is mostly cool for the transformation of the money bin into Merlock’s castle, which is a fairly obvious “hellooooooo animation budget” moment.
But… yeah, not a lot to it. In fact, only two real takes here.
The wishes all coming out a bit corrupted for the most part is strange given Genie’s character, but make perfect sense for DuckTales. As much as Genie doesn’t really land as a character, so him getting to escape the genie life in the end doesn’t have much emotional weight for me, that Scrooge does it is interesting. Boiled down to his core, Scrooge is an idealized personification of capitalism, right there in his motto: he made it by being tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties, and he made it square. His wealth has value because it reflects his own hard work, and if he had done so by taking short cuts or swindling others it would diminish it regardless of the numbers. Literally no rich person in history can claim this, but in DuckTales capitalism works! Which also means that wish-granting in a literal sense like the Genie’s is antithetical to the setting. Sure, you’ll get it, but it’s not going to come cleanly because you didn’t earn it. And similarly, Scrooge makes two wishes that amount to “return what is rightfully mine”, then uses the last to end the cycle by freeing the Genie. Because in DuckTales, doing anything else would just be against everything Scrooge stands for.
(We’ll set aside whether a foreign adventurer can ‘rightfully’ claim the treasures of folkloric figures. DuckTales has far more questionable examples than the treasure hoard of a legendary thief and I’m probably not qualified to dig into that topic anyway. And I mean, it’s a 1990 adaptation of a comic series from the ‘50s aimed at children, that sort of examination is way outside the scope here.)
The studio here is fascinating though. Far as I can tell, this is the first published work from Walt Disney Animation France, which is what it says: an animation studio under the Disney umbrella in France. And you can tell they’re new, they have a few animation errors here and there, the backgrounds don’t quite mesh with the character models (all the ducks have a sorta gloss to them that stands out), little things. But they also put in some quality work here in terms of designs and concepts where they had the space, so Disney basically kept them on the roster helping with the TV work, then tapped them to do the Goofy Movie. And then suddenly after that… they’re listed as working on every Disney film between Hunchback and Brother Bear basically. So I dunno what the whole story here is, the studio was ultimately absorbed into the broader company then dissolved when Disney exited traditional animation after 2005… but I wanna know more.
Rating- 5/10. But no real deep insight here. It’s… fine. I appreciate bits and pieces on an intellectual level, but no real deeper emotional resonance. Just kinda basic, averagish stuff.
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