In my childhood it was a special event when an animated feature film, almost always from the Disney studio, turned up in movie theaters. Nowadays, there are so many animated feature films these days that I wait to catch many of them when they reach cable TV.

That’s where I recently saw Ice Age: The Meltdown, 2006’s sequel to Fox’s previous animated film about a mammoth, a sabertooth tiger, and other animals of the Pleistocene period, and it was just as well that I had waited. I don’t care for computer-animated animals or humans that look more plastic than organic, as the Ice Age animals do to me, and it seems less forgivable in the second Ice Age film (and, for that matter, the third Shrek), considering the successes other computer animated films (like The Incredibles) have made in this regard.

I wonder if the premise of this second Ice Age, that the glaciers are melting, was inspired by the contemporary concerns with global warming. Yet considering that the end of the Ice Age made possible the worldwide growth of human civilization, why is the “meltdown” a bad thing?

One of the Ice Age movies’ most popular characters is Scrat the squirrel who is in continual, vain pursuit of an elusive acorn. This squirrel’s treading in the Sisyphean path of Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Roadrunner, but falls far short of the comedic invention and brilliant staging and timing of Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner cartoons. However, I did like Scrat’s brief visit to a hereafter especially designed for him in Meltdown.

For me Ice Age: The Meltdown is an animated movie in which the celebrity voices pull me out of the story, preventing me from sufficiently suspending disbelief. That’s because the characters are too thinly conceived, so the familiar personalities of the celebrity voice actors overwhelm them.

In contrast, I quite liked another 2006 animated film I caught on cable, DreamWorks Animation’s Over the Hedge, based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name. In large part this was specifically due to the voice casting: the voices may have been recognizable, but they were suited to the characters. This was especially important with the two lead roles. Bruce Willis’s typical screen persona fit the role of R.J., the trickster raccoon, who is something of a rascal but in the end loyal to his comrades. Similarly, Garry Shandling’s familiar comedy persona as a neurotic worrywart fit the part of Verne the cautious turtle.

Regular readers know that I like to compare adaptations to their source material, whether it’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” (over the last two weeks) or the Disney Tarzan musical to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel (see “Comics in Context” #133).

Several weeks ago I took a look at writer/illustrator William Joyce’s 1990 children’s book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, the source for this year’s Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons (see “Comics in Context” #174). The eccentric, futuristic family is taken from the book, but It turns out that the movie’s entire time travel plot was the moviemakers’ invention. Director Brad Anderson and the screenwriters wove their story around Joyce’s book, while leaving Joyce’s material essentially intact. This is an approach that I admire, since it simultaneously shows respectful fidelity to the original author’s work while still allowing the adapters considerable creativity.

On the other hand, finally reading the late New Yorker cartoonist William Steig’s 1990 picture book Shrek! revealed how very different it is from the trilogy of DreamWorks Animation movies that are very loosely based upon it.

Though supposedly ugly, the movie version of the ogre Shrek, when he isn’t scowling, looks like he could be turned into a cuddly doll that parents can buy for children (as indeed they can). I think he looks more visually appealing in the movies than the human characters do, who look like animated waxworks. In the first film Princess Fiona, the seemingly human leading lady, is revealed to transform into a green-skinned ogre like Shrek. But as an ogre she seems pleasantly plump, with facial features that are sweet and endearing rather than ugly: she thus becomes a cuddly doll, as well.

In the book, however, Shrek is repellent in physical appearance, in behavior, and even in smell. Shrek is utterly antisocial, enjoys frightening people, and revels in his own repulsiveness. Steig’s story is a parody of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Unable to stand him any longer, Shrek’s parents kick him out, and he overcomes one opponent after another (by breathing fire at them, for example), until finally he reaches the princess, who never takes human form in Steig’s book. She is an ogre as repulsive in looks and behavior as he is. In other words, they are perfect for each other. Steig’s description of their meeting reads like sexual foreplay (“Shrek snapped at her nose. She nipped at his ear. They clawed their way into each other’s arms. Like fire and smoke, these two belonged together.”) In Steig’s parody of the hero’s wedding that concludes both a typical fairy tale and the typical Campbellian hero’s journey, he informs us, “And they lived horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who who fell afoul of them.”

The appeal of Steig’s Shrek is like that of Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch or the Bizarro World in 1960s Superman comics. Through Shrek the reader can vicariously experience the release of not having to obey the rules, of not having to conform to standards of proper behavior, of letting one’s aggression loose, and being bad and not only getting away with it, but being rewarded. In short, Steig’s version of Shrek is a far stronger, more interesting, and more memorable character than the considerably watered-down Shrek of the movies. (See some examples from Steig’s Shrek! for yourself at http://www.williamsteig.com/shrek-int.htm).

The Shrek movies and Steig’s Shrek! book both turn the traditional fairy tale upside down by making ogres the hero and heroine. The difference is that Steig’s ogres act like ogres. The movies turn Shrek into a conventionally lovable children’s hero, with a heart of gold beneath his bad temper, who risks his life to save the humans’ kingdom, and who by this year’s Shrek the Third has mellowed into dullness. The first Shrek movie, especially, seemed to be preaching racial tolerance, presenting ogres Shrek and Fiona as a sort of racial minority in the human world. Shrek may have green skin and these odd knobs on his head, the movie seemed to be saying, but he’s really a sweet, loving, and even heroic individual, Just Like Us. Steig’s point, on the other hand, was that his ogres aren’t Just Like Us, or stand-ins for minority groups, but rather, are like the nasty sides of our personalities that we don’t dare show in public. The Shrek movies sentimentalize the title character and his wife; the book Shrek! gleefully acknowledges the side of children–and adults–that would love to breathe fire at people who get in our way. Steig’s Shrek! gives its readers a harmless means of vicariously releasing that negative energy, and seeing the title character get rewarded for it. Indeed, in the book Shrek’s marriage to the ogre princess signals to the reader that he or she is not alone in having this shadow side: other people do, too.

Steig’s Shrek even has a certain admirable integrity, in that he is true to himself, however nasty and gross that self may be. Steig also takes care that Shrek does not become truly evil. Steig’s Shrek even reminds me of Marvel’s own bad-tempered, green-skinned “ogre,” the Hulk, who nonetheless comes off as preferable in comparison to his adversaries.

If Steig’s Shrek! follows a satiric version of Campbell’s hero’s journey, Shrek the Third founders by getting Campbell’s monomyth wrong. Early in the film we see Shrek trying to fulfill the role of a prince in Fiona’s royal family and clumsily failing at it. Steig’s Shrek, of course, would set all the regal costumes he was supposed to wear on fire with his breath and take pleasure in scaring all the courtiers away. But the movie Shrek fits into conventional society, and I have different expectations for this version of the character. So I assumed that this was a set-up, and that in the course of the film, Shrek would learn to adapt to his new role as prince. With great power must come great responsibility, right?

Princess Fiona’s father, the king, who has been transformed from a human into a frog, is on his deathbed. Yes, that’s right, he is about to croak. The king’s dying wish is that Shrek become his successor. Shrek declines, in a clear case of what Campbell calls “refusing the call,” which will leads to disaster. (For example, Luke Skywalker initially refuses to go with Ben Kenobi, and insists on staying with his uncle and aunt, and then the Storm Troopers kill his relatives.) It also seems downright cruel to refuse the king’s dying wish. Instead, Shrek promises the dying king that he will find someone else to become the new monarch. I thought, okay, the film will be about how the movies’ socialized Shrek matures and learns to accept the responsibility that his father figure, the king, sought to give him. It is necessary that the son must in time assume the role of the father (as in, say, Disney’s Bambi).

But no. The movie Shrek really does find someone else to take over the throne: the youth who becomes King Arthur.

This isn’t how Campbell’s monomyth works! Luke Skywalker doesn’t go into space looking for someone else to become a Jedi Knight instead of himself. Harry Potter doesn’t try to talk Ron into becoming Voldemort’s archenemy so Harry can go back and live under the stairs at the Dursleys. Whereas Steig presented a mock heroic version of the monomyth, Shrek the Third proclaiming that ambition and taking responsibility are better left to Somebody Else. This does not make for a gripping plot or an inspiring protagonist.

Arthur manages to quell the threat posed by most of the movie’s villains by sympathizing with their being treated as outcasts and persuading them to accept themselves. Any child watching this movie will surely realize that if he tried this tactic with schoolyard bullies, he would be beaten to a pulp. So much for this Arthur’s leadership abilities.

At the end of the movie, Shrek and Fiona have moved back to Shrek’s cottage in the woods, abandoning their thrones, the kingdom of humans, and, it seems, any role in that society, But this isn’t the movie Shrek reverting to Steig’s antisocial version. Earlier in the movie, Shrek balked at the idea of becoming a father, and even had a nightmare about having a baby that vomits at hurricane force (enabling the filmmakers to put in the sort of gross bodily functions joke that seems inescapable in non-Pixar animated films these days). But by the film’s end, without explanation, Shrek has changed his mind, and has a trio of babies (his equivalent of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, I guess). In the book, Steig’s Shrek has a nightmare about babies, but this is part of Steig’s assault on sentimentality. The book’s Shrek has no tolerance for cuteness and doesn’t change his mind about babies; the movie Shrek dives right into a sea of sentimentality. Becoming a father is accepting responsibility, of course, but Shrek doesn’t seem to have any goal beyond that. It’s not even clear how he will support this new family. It’s as if he has combined parenthood with retirement; he’s a slacker with kids.

In the July 28, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, film critic David Denby points out that contemporary romantic comedy movies are dominated by male slacker heroes who are “absolutely free of the desire to make an impression on the world and still [get] the girl.” Shrek the Third shows that the 21st century slacker hero has moved into animation, as well. Denby refers to these stories as “slacker-striver romances,” in which it’s the woman who has the real career. Yet Fiona gives up her “career” as princess to join Shrek in slacker parenthood.

So there’s Shrek the Third’s message for kids: ambition is for other people.
When the call to adventure comes, refuse it. The movie Shrek is neither a true hero nor Steig’s distinctive antihero, but now merely a boring, unfunny disappointment. I think when the inevitable fourth Shrek movie comes out, I may wait to see it a year later on cable.

On the other hand, the great new Disney/Pixar film, Ratatouille, is about an unlikely protagonist–a rat named Remy–with an even unlikelier dream–to become a great chef–which he both pursues and triumphantly achieves.

As has been widely reported, Ratatouille’s initial director was Jan Pinkava, who came up with the original story, but Pixar ended up reassigning the project to Brad Bird, writer-director of The Iron Giant (1999) and Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) (See “Comics in Context” #62). It was Pinkava who apparently set the story’s principal themes: Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis told The Hollywood Reporter (Thurs. June 28, 2007) that “The story was boiling over with themes dealing with prejudice, family, following your passion, art and criticism.” before Bird took over. Nonetheless, Ratatouille in its finished form clearly fits thematically with Bird’s other animated feature films: Bird is Ratatouille’s auteur.

First, although Remy is specifically a chef, he represents any kind of creative artist. Bird acknowledged in an interview with Time Out Chicago that he was not himself a gourmet: “No, not at all. I am becoming more appreciative of good food every year, but I didn’t know that much about it going into this project and had to learn a lot”. On the website “The House Next Door,” Ryland Walker Knight argues that Remy as chef is specifically a metaphor for the filmmaker, even more specifically the director of an animated film. Knight points out that Remy thinks in visual images: “when he tastes something, the world disappears and a discothèque flurry of colors swirls around his head. He also imagines Chef Gusteau floating around his head as his own Jiminy Cricket, a figment of his imagination acting as guide and conscience.” Moreover, Remy directs his human ally, Linguini, in cooking by hiding beneath Linguini’s chef’s hat and pulling on his hair, as if they were the strings of a marionette, or, Knight says, “as would an animator bend characters to his or her will”. (I suppose that this could also be a less than complimentary visual metaphor for the way that an auteur director supervises the rest of the moviemaking team in implementing his creative vision.)

But Ratatouille settles the matter when one of its characters, the critic Anton Ego, asserts that “Not everyone can be a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere.” In his June 29, 2007 review, New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that this is the “moral” of the film. Though in this weekly column I have repeatedly disagreed with Scott’s reviews, I agree with his declaration that Ratatouille is “one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film”.

Looking back to Bird’s The Iron Giant, I recall that it had an artist character, too: Dean, who builds sculptures out of scrap metal, and who becomes a father figure to the boy protagonist.

The title characters of The Incredibles are a family of superheroes who are forced by the government to stop using their super-powers and live conventional lives. They can represent any people with talents who are prevented from employing those talents, and who are thus not allowed to fulfill their true potential. Bob Parr, a. k. a. Mr. Incredible, is compelled to work at a mind-numbing job in an insurance company. Isn’t this the artist’s nightmare: to be trapped in an unfulfilling office job, without any outlet for his creative imagination? In The Incredibles a conventional lifestyle is depicted as a dreary desk job. In Ratatouille the conventional life that Remy wants to escape is literally eating garbage alongside the other rats, whose taste buds are nowhere nearly as refined as his.

There is an actual artist in The Incredibles: Edna “E” Mode, the woman who designs costumes for superheroes. Bird voiced the character himself, perhaps suggesting a degree of identification with her. Edna comes across as a critic as much as she does as an artist, continually dispensing her sardonic opinions. So her true counterpart in Ratatouille may be the fearsome critic Anton Ego, who ultimately becomes the title character’s ally.

The Incredibles draws on a standard motif of the superhero genre: the individuals who seem outwardly ordinary but who secretly possess superhuman abilities. In The Iron Giant there is an even greater disparity between the role that the title character’s unknown builders designated for him and the role that the Iron Giant aspires to achieve. The Iron Giant is a colossal metal robot that bonds in friendship with the young boy Hogarth: in effect, the Iron Giant behaves in a “human” manner, often seeming like a child himself. Furthermore, the film reveals that the Iron Giant was built and programmed to be a war machine. But through his relationship with Hogarth, the Iron Giant rejects this programming. Instead, he follows a goal that Hogarth set for him, to use his enormous powers for good. Hogarth told the Giant about the comic book superhero Superman, and towards the film’s end the Giant becomes a superhero himself, uttering the name “Superman” as he saves a small New England town from a nuclear missile. (Iron Giant fans would enjoy taking a look at this picture over at the John Byrne Forum) The Iron Giant rejects the destiny for which he was created, and instead chooses his own.

Similarly, in Ratatouille Remy might seem to be condemned by his very nature: he was born a rat. This film provides such a vivid, extreme metaphor for the dilemma of the creative individual whose opinions differ from the community around him. Remy’s community of rats, including his own father and brother, all literally eat garbage. Remy is the only one in his community who has more discerning taste and realizes that he can do better. And yet he is pressured by his family to follow the conventional behavior of the rat world, and not to act any differently. There is even social pressure in Remy to walk on all fours like the other rats, whereas he prefers to stand on his hind legs, to keep his forepaws clean enough to handle food hygienically. Bird told The Los Angeles Times (June 28, 2007), “Because our lead character is a rat who wants to move into the human world, let’s show him make that choice to be on two legs and let’s make him being on two legs something he has to hide from his dad and let’s show it as something that changes over the course of the film”.

In the Time Out Chicago interview Bird described Dean, the sculptor in The Iron Giant, as a “beatnik.” (The film is set in the 1950s.) Dean is a nonconformist who seems to be something of an outsider in the small New England town that is the film’s setting. Remy is a nonconformist in the world of rats. But just as the people of that New England town assume on sight that the Iron Giant is a menace (as indeed he was designed to be), Remy is doomed by his outward appearance to be rejected by (most) humans. In one key scene in the film, Remy’s father shows him dead rats displayed in an exterminator’s window: this is how the human race treats their kind. Like The Iron Giant, Ratatouille asks if one can transcend the role that the world has assigned him. I just wrote a short piece about existentialism for a client, and now I see this existentialist theme–freeing oneself from restrictive tradition, taking control of one’s own life, creating one’s own identity–in Ratatouille.

Remy’s inner self does not match his outer self, or rather it does not match the conventional assumptions that are made about that outer self. People assume, correctly, that rats are unclean and eat garbage. That is true about the rats in Ratatouille as well, but Remy, though he looks like the other rats, does not conform to those expectations.

Remy fits the recurring archetype of the figure whose outward appearance disguises his inner virtues and talents. Clark Kent fits that mold, of course. Consider, too, Luke Skywalker’s reactions on first meeting Yoda, who initially seems like an eccentric, grotesque little troll. Or look at detective series like Columbo, in which the title character’s somewhat slovenly appearance and servile manner masks his high intelligence and steely will, or USA Network’s current series Monk, whose title character, beneath his obsessive compulsive phobias, is a brilliant detective.

So Ratatouille is also about the limitations of judging by external appearances. In other words, it’s about prejudice. While working on this essay I found myself about to write that as a rat, Remy inspires “fear and hatred” from humans, and realized I was echoing a familiar description of mutants from Marvel’s X-Men, a series that is famously about bigotry. It’s as if Remy, with his own “special powers,” his sensitive sense of taste and his genius at cooking, is a mutant rat.

Through its metaphor of the creatively gifted rat, Ratatouille suggests that innovation in the arts may come from persons or areas of culture that are not held in high regard by the mainstream. Certainly there is a long history of members of the cultural establishment rejecting not only innovative artwork but also the innovators themselves as outsiders who aren’t like Us.

For example, think of how long comics were generally regarded in America to be a gutter medium, and those adults who perceived them as art were considered wrongheaded and downright strange. (We are all Remy.) Now, in the early 21st century, comics increasingly receive respect from mainstream culture. Ratatouille has received extraordinary critical acclaim, and yet in the Time Out Chicago interview, Bird observes the continuing prejudice against the animation medium: “People see it as a childish sort of hieroglyphics. They connect it with the comics on the funny pages, as something that’s only meant to be silly and can’t ever represent anything deep or serious.”

In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” can not only represent dark, fearsome psychological forces but also creativity. So it makes psychological sense that an artistic innovator, an outsider, should take the form of a rat in the fable that is Ratatouille.

I will have much more to say about Ratatouille in the near future, but right now it is time for me to turn to my new recurring feature.

ATROCITY OF THE WEEK

Actually, there are several. First, there is the posting of photographs of the entire text of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows days before its official release date. I do not understand how people rationalize violating copyright laws and steal intellectual property. Do they somehow think that because it’s possible for them to steal it, then it’s not really stealing? In the case of these photographs, I wonder at the obsessive lengths to which someone would go to demonstrate to the world that he or she is an asshole.

Then on Thursday, July 19, two days before the release date, The New York Times published critic Michiko Kakutani’s review of the book, giving away elements of the plot. (I refuse to link to this.) This should give the Times’s Public Editor, its in-house ombudsman, plenty to write about. And how would the Times feel if some mole smuggled Times articles to The Washington Post before the times published them?

But the atrocity which I choose to treat at length is the cover to DC’s Showcase: Batgirl book of reprint stories about the version of Batgirl, alias Barbara Gordon, who was created in 1966. The cover shows Batgirl casually, perhaps obliviously, putting on makeup (even though she has her mask on) while in the background Batman and Robin are fighting for their lives against crooks. Presumably people at DC thought this was charmingly funny, while themselves being oblivious to the idea that female readers might find this cover insultingly misogynistic.

One line of defense for the cover is that it not only refers to an actual Batman story of the 1960s, but that it reflects the attitude towards women in superhero comics during that unenlightened period long, long ago.

I was a boy during that time, long, long ago, and I remember the story in question: it was “Batgirl’s Costume Cut-Ups” in Detective Comics #371 (January 1968), whose cover showed Batgirl declining to help Batman and Robin in a fight against bad guys because, she tells them, she has a “bigger” problem: “a run in my tights”. Should you read the story, you’ll find that Batgirl is actually slyly diverting the criminals’ attention to her shapely legs, or, as one of the crooks, apparently fond of slang that was outdated even then, puts it, her great “gams.” Batman and Robin are then able to kayo the distracted malefactors.

I was one of the regular contributors to editor Julie Schwartz’s letter columns back then, and I distinctly recall writing a letter about how bad this story was. Today I suspect that it was Schwartz’s attempt at doing a humorous story for a change of pace, but the joke still fell flat. This story is stupid now and it was stupid then.

It was also an anomaly. In her other 1960s appearances Schwartz’s new Batgirl characteristically dove right into fighting criminals. In the comics of the mid-1960s, Batgirl’s willingness to engage in direct physical combat was bold and daring. (William Dozier, producer of the 1960s Batman TV show, is said to have forbidden the TV Batgirl from punching people with her fists because he considered it “unladylike.” Instead, she executed dance-like kicks, drawing on actress Yvonne Craig’s Ballet Russes background.) Marvel’s superheroines of the time-Invisible Girl, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Marvel Girl–didn’t engage in fisticuffs. In the early Fantastic Four stories Sue Storm’s original power, invisibility, basically enabled her to hide.

For their period, Julie Schwartz’s Silver Age stories are actually surprisingly enlightened about women. Think of how Hawkman and Hawkgirl acted as equal partners, as spouses, as Thanagarian policemen, and as superheroes. Remember how Zatanna bravely traversed the world in search of her lost father. Consider how Schwartz and his collaborators presented several of the leading ladies of his series as career women: Iris West (The Flash) was a reporter (who did not snoop into secret identities), Jean Loring (The Atom) was a lawyer (who was perfectly sane, contrary to her depiction in Identity Crisis), and Carol Ferris (Green Lantern) ran a fictional counterpart to Boeing! Sue Dibny (The Elongated Man) was so intelligent and spirited a leading lady that her rape and murder in Identity Crisis seemed a cruel betrayal of the spirit of the classics of DC’s Silver Age. And I am of two minds about the fate that Alan Moore meted out to Barbara Gordon in Batman: The Killing Joke.

There was a lot of nonsense going on in Mort Weisinger’s Lois Lane stories in the Silver Age, but Schwartz and his writers John Broome and Gardner Fox shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. Rather than fixate on that run in Batgirl’s tights like that dopey crook, DC could easily have found cover art for Showcase: Batgirl that would have captured the character’s true, empowered spirit.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

In last week’s column I was singing the praises of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now you can read Ken Plume’s interview with another member of the MST3K team, Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo and the erudite Professor Bobo, and who partnered with Mike Nelson in the RiffTrax demolition of the first Fantastic Four movie. While you’re at it, go read Ken’s earlier interview with Murphy’s MST3K colleague Trace Beaulieu, the original voice of Crow T. Robot and the living embodiment of the show’s archvillain Dr. Clayton Forrester.

The July 23-Aug. 5, 2007 issue of TV Guide proclaims that “TV Guide hits Comic-Con International, the premier gathering of all things sci-fi and fantasy” (p. 29). Funny, I thought Comic-Con was primarily about, you know, comics (and what about WorldCon?). Well, this year I’m not going to Comic-Con, so you will be spared six to eight weeks of reports. Longtime readers will recall my past attempts to find the Marvel booth at the con. The Beat reports that this year Marvel will finally have a big booth in San Diego. And I still won’t see it. But I have plenty to write about here instead, as you will soon learn.

But if you do attend this year’s Comic-Con, and are not crushed to death by the crowds, please stop by the Comic Art Conference Session #9, “Superheroes, Villains and Vixens: A Discussion of the Top Pop-Culture Icons of 20th-Century America,” whose panelists include Gina Misiroglu, co-editor on The Supervillain Book (Visible Ink Press), to which I contributed. It’s in Room 30AB on Saturday at 10:30 AM.

One of this year’s special guests at Comic-Con, deservedly so, is Roy Thomas, one of the most important writers and editors in Marvel’s history. Mark Evanier will interview Roy during the “Spotlight on Roy Thomas” at 4:30 PM Saturday afternoon in Room 2. I understand that during the convention Roy will be doing a signing of The Marvel Vault (Perseus Books), the book on which he and I collaborated. Those of you with sufficiently large travel budgets should have Roy sign the Vault for you in San Diego, and then have me sign your copy at next April’s New York Comic-Con!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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