Review #69(nice): The Incredible Journey
Bit of a delay since several upcoming movies have proven hard to track down.
Thank you for your patience.
Next up is 1963′s The Incredible Journey
I think this movie is alright, bordering on boring. For the most part, this movie is 90% the animals wandering about aimlessly while the narrators struggles to come up with a story. It reminds me of those ‘real life adventure’ documentaries where they filmed the animals first, and then made a narrative around whatever they could film. This movie wasn’t awful but I don’t see myself watching it again.
This is one of those ‘bare minimum’ movies from Disney. There is very little money put into it and there is almost nothing of note in terms of camera work. The music is very pleasant, and I really liked the opening number. Other than that, I really did not see where the budget went. In fact one of my favorite moments is when they pull the cat out of the river, and you can clearly see it is a wooden dummy, like the stiffest most T-posing fake cat you can imagine. They basically paid the crew, the actors, and hired a few animal tamers and called it good. Then they used whatever coins they found in the seat cushions to pay for the special effects.
In terms of animal abuse, this is not nearly the worst from Disney. The animals seem mostly safe, and as mentioned above, they used wooden dummies for the more dangerous stunts. HOWEVER... there are two truly awful scenes with a bear and a lynx. No matter how tamed/trained those animals where, they could still seriously hurt the cat and dogs if they wanted to. I do not know where Disney keeps getting these baby bears from but it is not ok. The fact that I can say ‘the animal abuse isn’t all that bad this time!’ is not a glowing endorsement for Disney.
Once again Disney delivered a pretty safe movie that doesn’t take any major risks. There isn’t really any depth behind the narrative, since the animals are just animals. They want to get back to their humans, which is very sweet, but they don’t really do anything beyond that. We don’t get a lot of time with the human characters and since the narrator controls the motives of the animals, we barely get any character development. This could have been a lot better if they tied some more narrative hooks to make the movie have more meat. As it stands, the movie has very little to say, but then again it is just a movie about animals going on a fun little journey so I can’t dock it too many points.
The fact that the movie said ‘and the humans in the story’ in the opening credits is something I think all movies should include in the future.
I am all for cute animals doing cute things, but this wasn’t a very good attempt. There were several moments where the narrator said stuff like ‘the animals were beside themselves with sadness.’ only for it to cut to the animals wagging their tails and jumping around. At the end of the day this is a pretty basic film without much novelty or flair. The animals were put in danger, but from the research I did I THINK they all turned out ok. I cannot wait for CGI and green screen to finally eliminate this sort of thing in movies.
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