Sometime Philistine contributor Luke T. Harrington is back with this deliciously contrarian take on kid’s movies. I’m sure you will enjoy it as much as I did. –Asher
I have this theory that the only surefire way for a children’s film to achieve widespread acclaim is for it to apologize for being a children’s film.
Look at the recent blockbuster The Lego Movie. It’s easily the best-reviewed film of the year so far (currently sitting at a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes), and it’s composed of wall-to-wall childlike wonder, mashing together characters and mythologies with reckless abandon — until you get to the end.
Warning: Mild Spoilers in this Paragraph! I’m convinced it’s the third-act sequence of The Lego Movie, where the film shifts into live-action to reveal the kid behind the nonsensical plot,that’s responsible for its critical acclaim. In The Lego Movie’s third act, the filmmakers wink obviously at the audience, pulling back the curtain to say We know this is nonsense, you guys. It was a kid playing with Legos the whole time! Get it?
Yeah, I get it.
But the thing is, I got it long before we arrived at the third act. The film’s themes — conformity vs. creativity, following the rules vs. making your own rules — were perfectly clear already, as was the obvious juxtaposition of childlike imagination with conformist, button-down adulthood. And it was all encapsulated in the interactions of some toys, all behaving exactly as they would if a child were playing with them. Toppling the scenery to reveal the puppeteer added nothing to it for me, and honestly came close to ruining the whole experience. I’m convinced, however, that I’m in the minority there — and that, further, that that third-act “twist” is actually the main reason the film has achieved so much acclaim, irrespective of its crowd-pleasing pop culture jokes.
It’s what I’ve decided to call the Where the Wild Things Are Effect. If you ask around, you’ll find plenty of adults who will tell you the Maurice Sendak’s (admittedly classic) children’s book Where the Wild Things Are is their favorite, but I have yet to meet an actual child who even lists it in his (or her) top ten. Read it to a group of adults and there won’t be a dry eye in the house, but read it to a group of kids, and they’ll shrug indifferently and go back to their Legos — which is strange, considering the story supposedly takes place in the mind of a child.
I’ve thought about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the inner workings of a real child’s mind are actually strange and frightening to most adults. Wild Things follows a story arc that only makes sense to a world-weary, grown-up mind — one driven, eventually, by the idea of giving up your fantasies and returning to the reliable comforts of home. In the end it turns out to be not the story of a boy who thinks of himself as wild — it would have a very different arc if it were — but rather a story about a mother’s undying love for her son. It sells out the presumed audience of children to confirm the biases of adults — who, not coincidentally, are the ones who buy the books.
The Lego Movie, by inserting that final, live-action sequence, becomes subject to the Wild Things Effect as well — souring the innocent chaos of a child’s imagination by callously inserting the perspective of an adult, who is not privy to the child’s complicated thoughts but only his apparently violent physical acts. In its conclusion, The Lego Movie becomes no longer a story hatched from a child’s mind, but rather a tale of a longsuffering father learning to compromise for the happiness of his son. In a strange way, it’s actually condescending to adults — an apology for the “chaos” that transpired before it — in the same way that a love story shoehorned into a complex spy movie might be thought of as condescending to the female audience. We know you don’t get this stuff, so here’s something you can relate to, ladies/parents.
And it’s my contention that the third-act apology, not the wit and whimsy, is what has made The Lego Movie such a critical darling. Maybe I sound overly cynical about this, but try to remember the last time a film told exclusively from a child’s perspective was hailed with the resounding hyperbole that The Lego Movie has met with.
The most glaring example in recent memory of a purely childlike film is arguably 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which is currently sitting at a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes and an even less respectable 36% on Metacritic. And yet there’s nothing obviously wrong with it: it’s well paced, keeping the (nonsensical) plot moving and inserting action sequences whenever it begins to drag; it’s well cast, with A-list actors in nearly every role and cameos around every turn; and the special effects, while not top-notch, get the job done. It’s even got a penchant for biting satire, which it brings out just often enough to make some gentle points about modern culture. So why all the cynicism?
Again, I think Rocky and Bullwinkle’s only real misstep is in a failure to mitigate the childlike way in which its plot unfolds. The film is unapologetic for making things up as it goes, allowing the road-comedy plot to hop and skip from random coincidence to random to coincidence, tossing its characters in and out of prison as it sees fit, allowing them to do incredibly improbable things (like camp out in front of a movie theater after getting stood up on a date), and finally resolving its plot with absurd happenstance. It also doesn’t help that the arc of the main character, FBI agent Karen Sympathy (Piper Perabo), consists of learning to view the world through a perspective that is explicitly described as the eyes of a child, learning to accept weird coincidences and making an uncomfortable transition into a universe of moral absolutes. It’s a coming-of-age story in reverse.
Is it any wonder it was critically mauled?
It would potentially be even more controversial if I were to endorse the 1994 film Super Mario Bros., but I would argue that it holds up surprisingly well, as long as viewers are willing to accept that it has essentially nothing to do with the videogame it’s named for. If you take it on its own terms, as a sort of kiddie Blade Runner, it’s not bad at all. (And lest anyone think I’m just a ‘90s kid waxing nostalgic, I should point out that I was actually in college before I got around to watching Bros. for the first time.)
Bros. is considered famously terrible, but films rarely achieve such a distinction unless they are in some sense watchable (no film makes such a list for being simply boring), and Bros. has much about it that is at least interesting, regardless of what sort of value judgments the viewer wishes to pass on it all. The visual look, for instance, is undeniably distinctive, with both sets and costumes that are unlike anything else. The performances from the actors are fun to watch as well, even if many of them would later go on record saying that the experience itself was miserable.
What people object to, again, is the storyline, but try agreeing to play imagination games with a five-year-old sometime and see if you get anything more coherent. In fact, the storyline of Super Mario Bros. plays out exactly as if a child had written it: Let’s say we’re in this other dimension! With dinosaurs! But they look like people! But they’re dinosaurs! And there’s this one evil dinosaur and he wants to rule the world, so he turned the good dinosaur king into mushrooms! And there’s this really fat lady and she has these boots that help us jump really high! In the end, it’s a plot that makes exactly as much sense as that of The Lego Movie, but because the film fails to apologize to its adult viewers for being nonsense, Super Mario Bros. is a famous dud while Lego gets praised to the skies.
Released the same year as Mario (perhaps 1994 was the year for anarchic children’s fare?), Blank Check fits this mold of story-as-a-child-would-tell-it better than almost any other film I can think of. I recently found myself rewatching it, not because I enjoy third-rate ‘90s kids’ films, but because I realized it was the only box-office success of noted screenwriting guru Blake Snyder (best known for penning Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, which essentially defined the last 20 years of Hollywood blockbusters). I was surprised to see that, taken on its own terms, Blank Check holds up.
Again, said terms require you to throw any adult conceptions of believability to the wind, and let the logic of a child direct you. And the film plays out exactly like it would if an eight-year-old boy were telling the story: child hero Preston Waters comes into possession of a blank check, uses it to steal a million bucks from some criminals, then gets everything he’s ever wanted (including some way-too-old-for-him arm candy), only to have to defend himself against the vengeful crooks.
There are many accurate slings and arrows that can be hurled at Blank Check, and most of them have. The idea is an uninteresting blend of Home Alone and Richie Rich (strangely, it was released the same year as Richie Rich, which was also an uninteresting blend of Home Alone and Richie Rich), and its child actor is no Macaulay Culkin. Nor are any of the rest of the cast likely to be mistaken for Oscar winners. And yet, the film remains thoroughly watchable, despite my determination to hate it (both as a child and as an adult). It’s never boring. It’s filled with interesting characters, even if many of them are cartoons. And, in its own childlike way, it makes perfect sense.
Again, Blank Check’s main failing — and the reason it’s sitting at a 13% on Rotten Tomatoes — is in its failure to apologize for telling a story that will only make sense to children. Blank Check accurately portrays the mind of a child as not only chaotic, but full of vice as well: while it certainly pays lip service to the Big Lesson that Preston has to learn about the value of family, the meat of the film lies in allowing him to indulge his greed, his pride — and even his lust.
It’s that last one, I imagine, that really makes adults squirm. Preston spends much of Blank Check’s second act chasing after the beautiful twentysomething FBI agent Shay Stanley (Karen Duffy), and it’s not hard to see why critics would object to this, even if it’s portrayed fairly innocently. But do any of us really doubt that many 11-year-old boys fantasize about girls twice their age? Blank Check, again, plays out exactly like something a young boy would imagine: I’m so rich I have a waterslide in my backyard. And there’s this hot girl who really wants me. But there are bad guys! And I have to fight the bad guys! And I kick their butts!
In the same way Mario Bros. represents unmitigated childlike imagination and Rocky and Bullwinkle represents unmitigated childlike morality, Blank Check stares unblinkingly into the juvenile id. Its main sin is not its poor casting or its bland cheesiness, but in its failure to tell parents comforting lies about their children the way Where the Wild Things Are does (Your son doesn’t really want to be a wild animal; he secretly yearns for the comfort of home and hearth).
What’s particularly astonishing about this is that our culture has an endless appetite for watching adults indulge their fleshly lusts. Look at the recent Oscar nominee The Wolf of Wall Street, which is pure pornography both in a metaphorical and a literal sense. Central character Jordan Belfort spends the entire film indulging his lusts — for money, fame, power, sex, etc. — and learning essentially nothing from his actions. Audiences not only lapped it up but heaped awards on it.
A film about a child indulging his id, though, is anathema.
I could easily go on here. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, and Robot Monsterare all other examples of “famously terrible” movies that, upon closer examination, turn out to be terrible only for failing to speak to an adult audience. The Lego Movie, however, has cracked the code: you can make your film as chaotic and childish as you want, as long as you pen a sincere apology for it in the third act. Much as Max in Wild Things has to eventually come home to the things adults know to be important, The Lego Movie has to admit to its audience that Hey, we know this doesn’t make any sense. It’s a fine strategy if you’re aiming for respectability, but it’s a frustration to those of us who just want to be 20 years younger for a couple of hours.
Luke T. Harrington is a weekly columnist for Christ and Pop Culture and a sporadic contributor to Cracked. He’s currently writing HOLY SH*T! The Dirtiest Bits in the Bible for Hollan Publishing. He tweets over here and he blogs at The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism.
