Groovin’
Also saw The Emperor's New Groove. This latest spate of movie-watching prompted by having figured out how to hook up the DVD player in my new computer to my TV and stereo, so it's almost like having a DVD player. I suspect the resolution would be a little better on a real DVD player, but it's not bad this way.
As for Groove, it was as much fun as I'd been told. Again not brilliant, but quite funny, repeatedly. I really like the new direction Disney seems to be taking: losing the songs (I like musicals, and I'm quite fond of many songs from the Disney musicals, but it's nice to see them do something different, especially since nobody else has done it as well as Ashman & Mencken did), losing the animal sidekicks (thank goodness!), experimenting with offbeat art styles, doing wacky stuff. The unusual art styles thing goes back to bits of Hercules (and for that matter really goes back at least to the original 101 Dalmatians), but really takes off in Atlantis and Groove. And in both of those, they do stuff I'd never have expected. In Atlantis it was Claudia Christian as the sexy blonde femme fatale, and combat scenes in which people apparently actually die, and a jaw-droppingly over-the-top climactic battle sequence; in Groove it was making things cartoony (there's a touch of Warner Brothers here and there) in a way that I'm not used to seeing from Disney. Even if the protagonist in his llama form does look disturbingly like one of Donna Barr's horse-with-a-human-face characters.
The other thing I like a lot that Disney's been doing lately is modeling their animated characters on the physical appearance and mannerisms of the actors doing the voices. This goes back at least to Robin Williams in Aladdin, and continues to be used to good effect in Groove. John Goodman's good as the beefy plainspoken family-man peasant; you can easily see Goodman in the character, even though the character doesn't exactly look like him. And the villainess's face looks oddly like Eartha Kitt's even though she's strongly modeled on, um, this other villainess who I can picture but can't quite place. Someone who wears furs and carries a cigarette on a long holder and has an upturned triangular nose. Anyway, for my money the best character in Groove is Kronk, the elderly villainess's boy-toy/factotum, played to the hilt by Patrick "Tick" Warburton; Warburton never quite gelled for me as the Tick, but picturing him as the Tick in this movie worked marvelously. Big, good-hearted, not exactly stupid but not quite all there. And, to give some quirky depth and add some surreal humor to a couple of scenes, Kronk turns out to be a good cook. A very funny character, nicely done. Oh, and Goodman's character's wife and kids are also nicely done.
It's also nice to see some non-European faces on the characters (as with Mulan and Atlantis); too bad, though, that the only actor of color in the movie plays the villainess. (Also interesting that several characters say nasty things about the villainess on the grounds that she's old. Seems like Disney villains have to have some physical characteristic that can be made fun of.)
On the up side, this is apparently the first Disney animated feature film to include a pregnant woman as a character.