Mighty Joe Young (1949)

The profound cinema influence of King Kong rests not only in the fantasy it effectively brought to life, but in the tragedy at the core of its story, both conveyed in the mythic terms of early cinema. Yet one of the most interesting things about the creative minds behind Kong—producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack and his screenwriter wife Ruth Rose, and stop motion animator Willis O’Brien—is that they essentially remade their greatest creation twice, and in both cases tried to put a much more optimistic spin on the story. This started shockingly early with Son of Kong, released nine months (nine months!) after the original, and is a movie that I think has very interesting as a follow-up (I’ll probably write about it someday); it then came rolling back over a decade-and-half later with Mighty Joe Young, which saw the old gang working together one last time to unknowingly usher in the next decade of monster movies. This intentional softening of Kong‘s giant ape melodrama may in some ways seem like a commercial decision, to make it more kid-friendly (more kid-friendly than King Kong, a movie that fascinated children for decades), but the interpretation I’ve always preferred is that it’s the result of a deep guilt: they had created a resonant tale of humanity exploiting and destroying natural wonder and beauty, as represented by a beast both terrifying and sympathetic, and it’s terribly sad to think that such a thing could only ever be a tragic monster laying dead on the Manhattan concrete. Mighty Joe Young manages to capture many of those same themes, but in its deviations from the Kong template, it demonstrates that there is another way for it all to end.

Digimon Adventure (1999) & Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! (2000)

Bandai was pretty quick to expand on their line of Digimon virtual pet toys after they debuted in 1997 (as I wrote in my post about Digimon as a franchise from a while back), commissioning both an anime television series and a theatrical short at the same time, and eventually deciding to have the latter act as a prequel to the former—the short premiered as part of one of Toei Animation’s film festivals the day before the series began. That a company like Bandai would want to get in on the multimedia action ASAP is not a surprise (they’re also heavily involved in both Ultraman and Kamen Rider as well), and I can imagine that the meteoric rise of Pokémon at around the same time encouraged them to hype up their own battling monster concept as much as possible. But there’s a lot more going on in the early days of Digimon’s animation history, which makes it more interesting than just another toy franchise getting some spin-offs.

First and foremost, there’s the involvement of animator Mamoru Hosoda. Hosoda had really wanted to work for Studio Ghibli, and while his application was rejected, he was encouraged by Hiyao Miyazaki himself to continue pursuing his art. He then found work at Miyazaki’s old stomping grounds at Toei, and eventually was given the role of directing the Digimon Adventure short, impressing Toei enough that a year later he also directed the next Digimon film, Our War Game!, which in turn impressed the heads of Ghibli enough that they finally decided to hire him (meanwhile, those two short films were haphazardly cobbled together with two later Digimon films, and a soundtrack of contemporary pop songs, to create the English-language Digimon: The Movie, released theatrically in October 2000. This blog post is about the original Japanese versions, as the English compilation would probably be better suited for an Ink & Pain post.) Hosoda was intended to direct Howl’s Moving Castle, but creative clashes with the studio convinced him to leave, which led to Miyazaki taking over the project (an experience that seems to have left Hosoda with some long standing bitterness that has shown up in his subsequent films and in interviews.) In the two decades since, Hosoda has directed a string of acclaimed and award-winning animated films including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, and Mirai, all praised for their distinctive animation and emotional content (his 2009 film Summer Wars, in terms of theme and story, is essentially a re-imagining of Our War Game!) And to think, it all started with Digimon.

Monster Multimedia: “Abominable Snowman in the Market”

Every year I return to yetis, and every year I wind up with another sympathetic portrayal of yetis. It’s not like there isn’t anything out there that features yetis (or sasquatches…what is sasquatch plural? Should I go with Bigfeet?) as figures of pure menace, but how many of those are at all interesting? The fact is, from the day the idea of hairy wild men roaming around somewhere (be it on the tallest mountains in Asia or in the untouched woodlands of North America) in the wilderness became mainstream, there came a sense of camaraderie with these hypothetical great apes, living free out in the last remote parts of the world. As I said in my Urban Yeti! post, regular people seem to find them inherently amusing, maybe because they have incredibly non-threatening nicknames like “Bigfoot” and “Abominable Snowman”, and maybe because they recognize that there is something human about them, thinking of them as our distant cousins rather than some unknown wild animal. Maybe they are even a sort of aspirational figure, something that exists outside the urban malaise, roaming untethered. We want to like the yeti, whether they are real or not, and the art inspired by it reflects that.

The song “Abominable Snowman in the Market” hails from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ titular debut album, released in 1976, which is not the debut album of either Jonathan Richman or the Modern Lovers. Richman is known for his highly idiosyncratic sensibilities and manner of singing, his stripped down stylings crafted from the early days of rock and roll (as well from his early obsession with the Velvet Underground), and the humorous streak that runs through many of his songs, including the cult favourite “Pablo Picasso.” Considering his unique vocals, which intentionally waver and place bizarre word emphasis throughout chorus and verses, he seems particularly suited to songs with off-beat subject matter, which can range from observational odes to the mundanities of modern life (like shopping centres or financial districts) or borderline child-like fantasies. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (the album) is particularly rich in both, so a two-and-half minute tale of a yeti wandering into the most quotidian symbols of suburban normalcy fits in rather well, especially when it’s sequenced alongside equally whimsical songs like “Little Insect” and “Here Come the Martian Martians.” Richman’s lyrics are fully ensconced in the modern world, but he demonstrates that there can be just as much a place of imagination as anywhere else.

Meet the Applegates (1991)

It’s now October, the traditional Month of Monsters. To get into the spirit, I’ll be writing a series of loosely connected monster posts, which is entirely different from what I usually do.

While the style of ecologically-minded horror films didn’t really survive past the seventies (given the quality of movies like Prophecy, that shouldn’t be a surprise), the late eighties and early nineties were a high time for satirical/mean-spirited comedy, including many horror comedies, which could readily make use of the never-not-ongoing environmental concerns to fuel their misanthropy. Nothing makes one want to savagely mock humanity more than seeing the damage humanity does to the planet they live on. Social satire with a monster movie tinge seems like the perfect kind of project for New World Pictures to take on, living up to the legacy of studio co-founder Roger Corman, and also the perfect kind of project for director Michael Lehmann to take on immediately after his cult high school dark comedy Heathers. The product is Meet the Applegates, which an alternative kind of pop culture environmentalism, one that isn’t afraid to be vicious to make its point…sort of (we’ll get to that.) If nothing else, you can’t say there are many movies in which giant insects are the heroes and humans are not just the antagonists, but the embodiment of modern life as a sort of existential corruption.